


Dim Lit Rooms

by orphan_account



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, How does one write a happy fanfiction I don't understand the concept..., Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Manga Spoilers, Mental Instability, Past Sexual Abuse, Underage Prostitution
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-18
Updated: 2014-05-24
Packaged: 2018-01-09 04:03:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 6
Words: 29,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1141193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>-- Hiatused --</p><p>Grisha Yeager returned home with a freshly orphaned Mikasa, and no clue what happened to his only son. Eren had vanished, and was presumed dead.</p><p>Except there's a boy with green eyes and big dreams Levi likes to visit at a bordello when he's in the area. The real trouble is when Armin finds him too, and decides against all better judgment to save his childhood friend.</p><p>But there's no running in a world inside walls.</p><p>Based off a kink meme prompt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> If I decide to write another goddamn multi-chaptered depressing gay fanfic on my very deathbed at the ripe age of 96, it will be _too soon_.
> 
> I shouldn't be writing this because I said to myself Infractions was going to be my last big fic ever and I'd switch to original material after that, but DAMMIT this stupid show CAREENED INTO MY LIFE WITHOUT MERCY and I made this stupid fill at the kink meme ages ago and it dogged my heels forever after and I'm doomed now. (For the record, even if I doubt there's much crossover between the two crowds, no one who likes Infractions has to worry about abandonment. My attention is split, yes, but I am so close to finishing that sucker and I plan on getting drunk and eating cake when I do.)
> 
> The original prompt from the kink meme is [here,](http://snkkink.dreamwidth.org/3666.html?thread=5687378#cmt5687378) along with the original version of this prologue. I've made a few edits: mostly phrasings I didn't like and changing Corporal to Captain, as that just seems to be the more accurate title for what Levi does and how his seniority works in the ranks, but also one or two passages that didn't sit right with me for Levi's characterization. Ultimately it's still much the same thing.
> 
> Now if you'll excuse me I am going to continue binging on poor life decisions and order a massage on craigslist.

"You're not my type." He made the declaration with the same flavorless, unaffected drawl with which he might turn down an unsavory dish, and punctuated it with the clink of his glass hitting the table. 

And yet his visitor was not to be deterred.

"How so?"

"Too young." 

It rankled the boy, clearly. He wasn't so practiced as the whores in their twenties, or even those just bobbing at the cusp of their second decade, letting his ire show in how his brow wrinkled, his lips pressed into a sliver of a pout.

"I'm however old you want me to be." 

The man didn't scoff, but his upper lip curled as if he might. He switched to his cigarette then, dabbing it in the tray and prepping for a long drag. "Why are you over here, anyway? The fat shits with all the gold are at that table," and there he pointed to a more reclusive end of the parlor, where a cadre of merchants whose guts tended to lump over their belts laid down cards and whispered filthy things into the ears of the boys and girls under their arms. "They love little spring chickens like you. Go earn yourself a hot meal."

"You are Captain Levi, aren't you?" he asked pointedly. "I was told to look for someone short and cross and bored."

"Who the fuck told you that?" The boy shrugged. Levi rapped his fingers on the table and watched the boy for telling twitches. "Why are you looking for me? I might be a Captain, but titles don't line your pockets for shit in the Survey Corps."

"It's not the money," he said, and it didn't seem to be a lie.

"The prestige?" To that, the boy said nothing. Levi snatched him by the chin and dipped his thumb into his mouth, lilting his head upward to see all the better. The boy acquiesced with no hesitation and dropped his jaw. In that motion one could see he had been at this game far too long already, the slow descent languid and more for show than practicality. A hotheaded harlot, then, who couldn't keep a proper check on his feelings or his tongue, but knew how to please regardless. "How many baby teeth are in there?"

The rejection was immediate. The boy scowled and yanked his head away, snapping his jaw shut with a click before answering peevishly. "None."

Levi took a drag and loosed a cloud of smoke directly in the boy's face. His look of thinly concealed outrage was nearly enough to get a chuckle. Not that he had been looking for a laugh to start with. It was hardly as if he was pushing the boy away out of sheer cruelty; more necessity than anything. As it was Levi only let his mouth curve into a lopsided smile, small and final, and said, "Way too young."

The boy coughed lightly, but only once. Levi's cigarette was stolen from him by nimble fingers, which flipped it deftly around and into an airy grip between the first two fingers, the way a noble woman might partake in a smoke through the elegant length of a filter. The boy pressed it to his lips and sucked. The embers lit and spread, ashes falling away until a centimeter of blackened tobacco poked out from the ivory paper. He then tapped it on the tray, releasing the excess, and turned his head loftily to the side to unleash the smoke in a thin, seamless stream. Not once did he blink or turn his eyes from Levi, the turn of his head putting his lashes to maximum effect as they coyly sheltered the edges of his too green eyes.

"Old enough," he said matter-of-factly, and released the cigarette for good. "But if you're short on money and too proud to say so, I'll spare you the embarrassment."

The chair grated as he pushed it out, the ugly sound marring an otherwise perfect exit.

"Oi." 

When the boy turned back he only looked over his shoulder, hip cocked and a brow raised. Levi knew it was a gimmick. He still rapped his fingers on the table with bare impatience, damning his weak resolve under his breath, and demanded, "How much?"

The kid grinned, and his teeth, a suspicious white for such a seedy hole in the wall as this, were framed by the most perfect and wicked smile in Sina. "We could talk about that upstairs if you want."

"You're a real brat, you know that?"

The boy shrugged, and kept walking. Levi's eyes stayed on the sway of his hips, watching how the tiny creases in his trousers shifted and strained on the way. He took the last of his drink in one bitter gulp, and crushed his cigarette out in the tray. He left what he estimated to be the correct coins for the fare on the table, and followed those swinging hips to the rouge curtain at the rear of the club.

~*~

In spite of his misgivings, Levi found the brat to be a perfectly wonderful fuck.

He let him fuck him standing, Levi's cock freed from his open pants and his shirt off, while the boy had slipped free of every ounce of clothing he had as if it were butter on a hot pan. He pushed back into him with dogged determination, their combined efforts producing loud slaps, skin on skin, as Levi's hips jutted and slammed into the well rounded ass in front of him. The boy sometimes paused to roll his hips with a lascivious rhythm, either up and down to bob on Levi's dick like bait in water, or in short circles. The sensations of both had Levi clutching the boy's hips to near bruising, groaning out in glorious ecstasy. The boy clung close to the wall, his back arched with an unseemly curve, and whimpered and gasped and fought even harder to ruin Levi for the rest of the week.

He didn't put on an act, which was refreshing. At one point some baleful whore in the room adjacent started wailing wildly as if paid specifically to do so. The boy was upright by then, his back welded to Levi's chest by sweat and the greedy clutch the Captain had around his middle. He craned his head back to Levi and rolled his eyes in irritation.

"Friend of yours?" Levi grunted.

"Not really," the boy conceded, and spread his lips to catch Levi in a wet, sloppy kiss, the angle preventing them from connecting proper and exposing the slide of their tongues to the air. He resumed rocking back into him, their pushes short and sharp as Levi was buried to the hilt in this proximity. He lifted his leg without protest when Levi grappled to get a hold of the backside of his thigh, and obligingly held it aloft as Levi slid his cock in at slow, luxurious speeds into the new angle it provided.

The boy ran his hand over his own dick when he was finally ordered onto his knees in front of Levi. He let his mouth fall open and his tongue hang loose, eyes closed dreamily as Levi did his best to aim his cum into his mouth, the boy's hand pumping madly at his length as he matched the pace in his own lap. Levi pulled at his scalp when he came, moaning low, and getting most of the cum where it should be. Only one thin white glob painted his lips, and the boy lapped that up after as if it were leftover gravy at Christmas. He swallowed it all sumptuously.

"Thank you," he said breathlessly. He was still pumping at himself and Levi pursed his lips, then kneeled. It stunned the boy enough that he stopped, wide eyed and nervous for the first time, but he flushed redder than ever when Levi took a firm grip of his cock and wrung it fast and hard. He yelped, gasping for air, falling back on his heels and Levi followed to crouch over him. They kissed deeply and Levi could taste the himself still, and the boy came all over his lap in spurts.

While Levi was doing up the buttons on his shirt the boy lounged on the bed they had not deigned to use, pulling the blankets over his lower half for warmth and watching Levi dress with insatiable curiosity. 

"When you come back next time," he said slowly, with the firmness of a promise and the hesitance of a child, "I'll give you a break on the price if you tell me something."

"What makes you so sure I'm coming back?" Levi rattled off without so much as a second glance. When he did look a part of him regretted it, seeing that brow wrinkle and his mouth part in dismay. But he carried on nonetheless. "Awful presumptuous of you, isn't it?"

"I mean it. I'll take a pay cut if you just tell me a good story."

Levi paused. He had been buckling his pants back together, and he halted completely with the long tail of the belt wagging in the air. "A story."

"About outside." The boy seemed to sense his skepticism and clarified with a small measure of panic: "Outside the walls, I mean. I want to hear about the world outside the walls."

Levi did not move. "There are no good stories." The boy didn't seem deterred. He only blinked, and those damnable green eyes were too wide and too lovely and finely shaped to leave it at that, so Levi sneered and said, "You want to hear about people getting eaten alive? That shit get you off or something?"

"No!" He took incredible offense, suddenly propping himself upright like a sphinx and hot in the face. "I don't want to hear about fucking Titans. I want to know what the world is like. What the air smells like. What animals live outside. What mountains -- have you ever seen the ocean?"

"What the fuck is the ocean?"

"It's water, except it goes forever. Farther than you can see." He brushed his hand through the air in a sweeping gesture, as if covering the scope of the world there.

"Where did you hear about that?"

The boy went quiet. "Sometimes I buy books," he admitted with a bitter bite and lowered gaze. 

"That why you were out looking for me?" Levi pressed, and he received a reluctant nod. He frowned. He buckled his pants at last and left the cravat and the jacket for the moment, approaching the bed to curve his hand over the boy's fine brown hair. "You're pretty fucked up for a whore."

"Fucked up is what a whore's supposed to be."

It was said so plainly that it took him a moment, but Levi laughed. He stooped to kiss the boy with a slight more gentility than before. It seemed to please him fine, as he was smiling secretively and blushing as Levi pulled away. "What's your name?"

"Eren."

A plain name for such a pretty boy. "You know the Corps don't always come back."

"You're the best, though." Eren shrugged. "Thought you would have a decent chance of it."

Levi petted his hair and decided to take that as a compliment. "Good odds. You're a smart gambler. Can't promise I've got stories worth your while, though."

"That's all right," he said. It clearly wasn't, but he was still smiling so brightly. "See you whenever. Captain."


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm taking some liberties with the attack on Trost -- namely that it happened right at graduation. I'm going to pretend there's some secret but very legitimate reason for this, and because we have yet to uncover anything about the shifters' motivations and logic I feel like it's okay to keep operating in this vein without having to justify it. If Isayama gives us more to work with soon I'll incorporate that somehow, or just make this even more AU than it is.
> 
> I should also add that there will be manga spoilers to the tags, shouldn't I? I'll go do that now.

He was not entirely sure whether it was good fortune or curses that brought him to this moment. Armin was all but ready to sink under the table and exit the establishment on his hands and knees in sheer embarrassment. 

For one, this should not be his station. Whatsoever. If anyone deserved to be rounding out the ranks of the new Military Police recruits it was probably Ymir, who was fantastic but never tried hard enough, or Mina, who worked oh so earnestly but could never seem to breach the barrier to greatness. Or even Christa, who had actually made the top ten and yet puzzlingly opted out in favor of the Survey Corps.

He would not be here without Mikasa, who had gripped him tight and shook him by the shoulders nearly every day for two thirds of their training until he had snapped to attention in his final year and put his back into it. “Think of Mrs. Yeager,” she would say. “Fight,” she would urge, “Live. That’s all we have left to do.” 

She didn’t call her “Mother”, nor did Armin, even though she always looked at them with watering eyes and outspread arms. When she was well enough to do so. And it was largely for that, and not his own well being, not Mikasa’s piece of mind, that Armin pushed. Armin dedicated each night to maneuvers and sit ups and pushups and stretches and mastering whatever equipment he could covertly get his hands on, because that was his burden now. He clung to her best days and remembered that there were doctors available in Sina who could cure the mind. A talking cure. Too frivolous for the outer walls, but those with enough gold in Sina could pay for a few good sessions, pay for a room in a quiet place with nurses to tend to the sick of the mind. 

So Armin pushed. 

When even that hadn’t been enough, Mikasa’s unprecedented excellence allowed her an audience with commanding officers that ought not to be giving her the time of day. She pointed out Armin’s gifts in intellectual pursuits, strategy and the like, as well as the dedication he had shown in his last year. She pointed out their ailing adoptive mother. So after much conferring and several interviews, Armin found himself welcomed with open arms and congratulatory cheers by his former classmates into the fold of Wall Sina.

And if it wasn’t for any of these things, he surely couldn’t afford to be here now, drinking to celebrate his late entry into the ranks, grimacing in embarrassment as Connie fumbled over his words with a toothy grin to an older woman in scarlet, who only cackled at his expense.

“He’s going to get slapped,” Armin said surely. He covered his eyes as Connie leaned over to the dame and waggled his brows. Marco tittered into his glass.

“Well. Well, he’s gotta try. He can try, which is better than we’ve been doing.” Marco wriggled his nose and buried it in his pint. He drained a quarter in one go. 

“Marco. We’re in a whorehouse,” Armin retorted. “Are you really looking to find a girl _here?_ ”

Marco tittered again, eyes shifting from left to right. “Um. Right. Yes. That’s a good point Armin.”

Armin fidgeted with the handle of his mug morosely. It was his second drink and yet he was still failing to enjoy the night. He had assumed Marco would be better company than the rest of the boys on this seedy excursion. Maybe he ought to have tried sitting with Bert – except he would smell a little by now, wouldn’t he? Alcohol pushed him to perspire more than ever. “Whose idea was this again?”

“I can’t remember. Thomas’?”

“Thomas isn’t here. He joined the Garrison.”

“Right.” Marco stopped to think it over. It seemed like it might take some time, so Armin excused himself and slid his drink off the table, making his way across the room while remaining as small and unnoticeable as possible.

He would find Jean, tell him he was not feeling well, and retire for the night. He was not going to stay around for when the whores and the barkeeps realized that they had spent all their coin by the third round of drinks, or when someone boisterous picked a fight with a merchant or a senior officer, or worse. And most of all he wanted to escape the attention of the women and the boys, who latched onto unattached persons with alarming tenacity, their wicked tongues putting promises in your ear that belonged only in your most secret dreams.

In brief: he was a hair short of terrified and half sure he would have rather tried his luck in the Survey Corps than endure another moment in this pulsating hot house of sin. 

Armin rose to the tips of his toes and peered around, being jostled once or twice by fumbling bodies. He could not see Jean, nor did anyone respond when he called out for him. He saw the aforementioned Bert in one corner, who was laughing with high neurosis and sweating around the pits as a buxom blond raked her nails over his chest. All Armin could think was ‘Of course.’ Bert was their tallest member and the least young looking next to Reiner, and far too easily swayed by a little sweet talking. 

He ought to go save him, he thought. Bert would be too kind to tell the woman outright he couldn’t pay for what she wanted to give him, and she would be furious over the wasted time and he would spend the rest of the week flagellating himself over having angered a beautiful woman. Though she might not respond so kindly to Armin’s interrupting, all the same. 

His lips twisted petulantly, but he made towards Bert’s table anyway. 

A hand brushed over his backside. Hot breath was in his ear, paired with a bear-like rumble for a voice. “Hello there sweet pea.”

Armin froze. He looked over his shoulder, but whoever had done it had retreated, or gone nonchalant. Someone smacked into him and slopped liquor down the sleeve of his Military Police uniform (the uniform he had worn precisely to avoid being pestered, as he knew being small and still boyish in the face meant he could be mistaken for working here), and as he bemoaned the abrupt coldness and shuffled to the side to wipe at it properly with a handkerchief, he heard something that stopped him dead in his tracks. 

A laugh. 

Armin blinked, staring into his mug at the dissipating foam of his ale. Every muscle in him had gone mysteriously tight, as if he’d heard the foreboding booms of Titan feet in the distance, but it was only people. Just people, sloshing spirits down their throats and groping and catcalling and hollering out their gaiety. He shook his head. He wasn’t quite certain, but something was off here. Something did not belong, something was striking a note of alarm in him and he couldn’t be sure why. 

He then convinced himself he had only heard Jean, or Marco even, but soon after he heard it again, higher and tapering into a yelp of surprise with a thud to match. He whipped around.

Near the rear exit there was a booth table, two burly men in fine tailored shirts standing up in their seats, red in the face and jeering. On the table they had a boy pinned by the shoulder, the rest of him sprawled loose and his legs disappearing over the far edge. One of the men wrenched his shirt up to his neck and licked at his belly while the other pawed at his head. The meaty hand tugged at his hair, pulling his head backwards off the edge of the table so that he could attack his jaw with wet kisses, leaving the skin glistening behind.

Armin’s heart stopped when he saw the glazed green eyes staring wide at the crowd. 

He continued to watch, transfixed, as the boy smacked blindly at them with his arms. It looked like he was trying to protest, the word ‘wait’ ruminating on his open mouth as he slapped their attentions away. The men were either too drunk or too boorish to care.

“Oi!” barked the bartender. He had a knife in hand and was chopping at the air between him and the rowdy pair. “You’re either upstairs or you’re out!”

That did stop them, pulling them upright with murder in their eyes. One sneered and yanked the boy off the table, trapping him high over his shoulder like a naughty child about to be punished as the other sauntered over to the bar. He made a show of pulling out a handful of coins from the satchel at his waist, glaring the grizzled bartender in the eye all the while. The coins clattered over the gin-drenched oak. “That about do it, chief?”

His partner snickered, and slid out of the booth to make for the inauspicious red curtain in the back wall. The other followed. The boy propped himself up on his elbows over the man’s back, catching the bartender’s eye for one moment of pure exasperation before he disappeared behind the velvet, and though Armin knew he hadn’t been looking his way his heart stuttered and stopped completely. 

Those were Carla Yeager’s eyes, reimagined in vivid green. The pert nose was still there, the face thinned, perhaps, but the black-brown hair was still cut short and loose in the same ragged style he’d worn at nine years old. 

Armin was nearly breathless. His chest was caught in a Titan’s grip.

*~*

Of all people, Connie was the one to rescue him from his stupor at the brink of the jam-packed floor.

“Armin! Armin, come over here. Meet Rita,” He said, tugging his arm.

“I’d rather not,” Armin said without thinking, staring off at the curtain still. “Connie, wait, I think I saw—“

But he was bullied off into parts unknown before he could say a word, the raucous chatter and the whines and strums of a devilishly played fiddle turning Connie deaf to his pleas. Armin tried to dig his heels in but it was difficult while in the thick of things, and getting battered by the crowd made him all the more anxious to escape. As it so happened Connie’s strong-armed lead was his surest bet of it, and the moment he was free of the sea of drunkards he was being presented with a perfumed and seven-ringed hand of a pinch-faced young woman with auburn curls. 

“Hey, Armin,” she cooed. Armin saw no choice but to shake her hand. “Are all your friends so small?”

“What?” Armin said. Connie was laughing and under the arm of another girl (the woman in scarlet from earlier was nowhere to be seen), who was pretty in spite of her unusual looks, bearing a long face and the heavy lidded eyes of a hound dog. “Connie? You can’t have bought—”

“Another round!” he finished, clinking his mug against Armin’s own inert one. He had lost about a third of his drink over the sides to the bustle of the floor. “Oh and this is Teagan. We’re great pals.”

“Such great pals.” She laughed. Her voice was deep and husky. “As long as the glasses stay full.”

“And they will!” Connie declared joyously, sliding into the table with the girls. Rita patted the seat beside her for Armin to join in.

“Connie you’re going to starve until next week’s pay if you don’t stop buying booze!”

“Armin! Armin…” Connie pressed a finger to Armin’s lips and leaned in close. “Sssshhht.” He then took Armin’s cup and pressed the rim insistently at his mouth, tilting it upwards until Armin was obligated to either take a large guzzle of his drink or drown. Rita snickered and patted his back as he finished with a cough, and wiped his mouth with her thumb as she dragged him down to sit.

“It’s all right, sweet pea, a little fun never hurt nobody.”

“I can’t afford – We can’t afford—“ Armin stammered fruitlessly.

It was Rita’s turn to hush him then, tapping her bejeweled finger on his lips before leaning into his ear. “We know. We’re taking a little break, yeah?” She pulled away and petted his hair with a grin. “Talking to some nice boys for a change. You are a nice boy, aren’t you Armin?”

Her fondling had his belly in knots, but he supposed there was nothing to do but nod to that. 

Teagan and Connie seemed utterly preoccupied whispering divine secrets into one another’s ears, which left Armin to entertain Rita. He couldn’t focus, though. The heavy swig of ale was already weighing down in his head like a leaden blanket, and he couldn’t stop watching the red curtain, hoping for another glance of the boy. Now that he was on the other side of the room with a pit of people between him and the veiled stairway, it was easy to tell himself he had imagined it. Lord knows how often he had imprinted the faces of people he knew onto strangers in the distance, ran after passerby with the same gaits or the same hair as old friends and neighbors only to find that they weren’t the same people at all. All but a sliver of his hometown remained in the world, and the ones he hadn’t kept track of, he had lost for good.

Rita was hardly oblivious to his fixed gaze.

“Ah, maybe you’re a little naughty after all,” she teased, draping an arm over his shoulder. “You’ve got a one track mind, I see.”

“No no, it’s not that, it’s…” Armin bit his tongue and furrowed his brow, directing his focus, willing away the pressing lethargy of inebriation as he searched for the most innocuous way to ask after the boy.

If nothing else, he knew that he would have to play obtuse if he wanted to find out anything. Eren had disappeared under murky circumstances. Mikasa’s parents had died at the hands of slavers, and he had stole into the cabin they kept her in and switched places with her, urging her to run and passing off his scarf to her. For courage, he had said. That was the last anyone had ever seen of him, and the Yeagers had been of fractured minds and hearts ever since. 

Pushing inquiries about children that were presumed dead in a place that might be benefitting from that was slightly suicidal. The best guise might be the least savory one, then.

His pulse sped. He turned to square Rita in the eye. “Actually, I did see someone earlier. A boy?”

“Oh?” Rita arched her brow. She snickered again. “Dear, what a shame. I should have guessed.”

“What do you—“ Armin grimaced and shook off the sting to his ego, waving his hand through the air. “I just want to know who he is. He went upstairs with two men, so he must work here. Dark hair? Green eyes? Kind of thin.”

Teagan was leaning in now, draped over a hazy-eyed Connie. Her lipstick had smudged half up her cheek and marked a map over Connie’s jaw. “You talking about Eren?”

There his heart went again. No coincidence. 

Those eyes, and that laugh. That _laugh_ , it had him spooked and he hadn’t even thought about it in years, probably couldn’t have remembered how it sounded if he tried, but his whole body had seized upon hearing it before his mind caught up to speed. 

Not that he should get ahead of himself. There could be another Eren. Or an “Aaron”, or “Erin”, or any other permutation. Armin felt his palms go cold and clammy, and thrust his hands under the table to brace them on his pants. 

“I think he is,” Rita said with a wolfish grin. “Armin, sweetie, trust me when I say you should leave it be.”

“You’ll get eaten alive,” Teagan assured.

“What do you mean?” Armin looked between the two of them, perplexed. 

“He’s got a temper, baby, a real bad temper. And if that doesn’t get you, his regulars will pop your head clean off your shoulders. You’re at the bottom of the pecking order.”

“The boys won’t give you the time of day, kiddo. You’re their age. Come back in five years when you can play daddy better. They’ll be eating out of your hands.”

Teagan eyed Rita slyly. “I don’t know, I don’t know. He’s the right… _size_ for Eren, wouldn’t you say?”

Both girls burst out laughing. Connie jumped, having fallen asleep for a moment, shouting, “What did I miss?”

Armin nearly panicked, knowing well that Connie could put a fire under a rumor better than any loose tongued gossip in the barracks. But he was swaying in his seat and blinking far too often. Armin pursed his lips and put a hand over his eyes. “Go back to sleep, Connie.”

“Ya’right…” Connie dozed away. Teagan patted his head and pressed another red kiss to his brow. 

“I just do not get it,” Rita was griping. For the first time since he had sat down at the table her voice was free of the flirtatious lilt, and she sounded just the same as any girl in his squad. Teagan, too, was alight with a more authentic glint in her eyes, leaning over as Connie slumbered beside her. “I don’t get it. Not even speaking objectively, Eren is easily the prettiest boy we’ve got. Hands down. He could bat his eyes at any son of a bitch with a Lord or Sir to his name and he’d be whisked away to eat figs and wear silks for the rest of his damn life.”

“Exactly.” Teagan toasted her friend and took a hefty gulp of ale. “Lord Almighty, I’d murder to be someone’s pampered little mistress.”

“Right? And he could have it so easy, really, but instead he just fawns over that stubby little sour puss! I could understand if he was at least charming, but he’s so surly! And he’s not handsome, he’s not rich—“

“He’s clean.” 

Rita yelped delightedly at that. “Oh, right, I forgot. The sweet allure of perfumed soap! How could Eren have possibly resisted. His lavender scented lover.”

“Captain, I’ve laundered my bed three times today for you!” Teagan spluttered behind her fist, and tapered into a round of giggles.

“Captain, I’ve used a whole bucket of bleach on my room for you!”

“Oooh, Captain, scrub me harder! I want it to burn!”

Rita howled and slapped the table with her hand in laughter, her rings rapping the wood like a drum. “He has to be hung. Like a donkey. He has to be hung, there is no other explanation.”

“Maybe his donkey cock weighed him down so much that he couldn’t grow.” Both girls dissolved into alarming fits at this, tears streaming down their faces. Armin was lost. 

“Who are you talking about?” 

“Oh, oh we can’t. We don’t kiss and tell.” Rita zipped her lips with a smirk. Teagan had a wry smile still clinging to her face.

“Well now he knows it’s a Captain. He’ll just have to keep his nose to the ground to find him.”

“Literally, pretty much. Which division are you, sweetie?” Rita grabbed at his jacket and inspected the embroidered unicorn, the emblem of the Military Police. “Oh, never mind. You’re not under his command. Don’t you worry. Captain Short Stack won’t be able to kick your teeth out for eying up his future wife.”

“Are they…in a _relationship?_ ” Armin said thickly. He had spent the majority of their conversation parrying his gaze back and forth and trying desperately to reconcile the image of his nine year old friend with a boy whore who was the apparent property of an ill-tempered dwarf. 

“Good Lord, no! They just have an _affinity,_ ” Rita articulated. “Come on now, I know you’re fresh out of the pram, but use your head. What’s the sense in courting a working boy?”

“Everybody’s got their favorites, that’s all,” Teagan added dryly. “Plus Eren gushes about him all the damn time.”

“Especially in the baths,” Rita said with a cocked brow. They broke into riotous cackles again, and Armin had had enough.

“I’m going to the restroom,” he announced weakly, and extricated himself from the table on shaky legs. His head was swimming, from the booze and the revelation and the weakness of his own heart. His face had drained of color and he had to blink twice to see proper. Rita asked if he was going to finish his drink and he pressed it into her open palms. She kissed his cheek in thanks, cooing, “You’re such a doll.”

“And Armin! If you find Eren, come straight in his mouth, okay? Tell him Teagan said hi.”

Both of them were inconsolable wrecks, the victims of their own humor, banging on the table and the black lines around their eyes dragged to smudges by tears. Connie snoozed between them, unwitting and utterly at peace. Armin was happy to leave.

If anything, the place bustled even more furiously than ever. Armin wound through the floor, emerging with no small struggle near the booth that had stopped him in his tracks earlier. A new group had already claimed it, even better dressed men with wizened lines breeching the edges of their eyes and soft faced boys and girls in their laps as they indulged in dark ales. A lump had swelled in his throat. Armin swallowed it away and cast his gaze around. A rowdy bunch (was that Reiner and Jean in the center?) were crowding the bar, hollering drink orders at the poker-faced man slamming down glasses and magicking bottles of all sizes and poisons from shelves with a cannon shot’s inescapable speed.

No one was watching the curtain, and no one seemed to pay it any mind when it flicked to and fro from its hangings once Armin had sliced through the gap and crept up the stairs. 

There were several levels to the establishment. It was a four storey building from the outside, and no doubt there was a basement below the bar for storage. The underground tunnels were said to connect whorehouses and city pubs like strings on a loom. Better disguise for the wealthy, who could enter a bar for a quick pint and then steal into the underground towards the brothels unseen. Those types situated themselves on the second floor instead of the circus that was the first, where a matching set of curtains blocked the entrance to a more private, plusher parlor.

But the third floor was for one purpose alone.

Armin balked and nearly turned clear back around at the wails and moans arresting his ears now. If it was a cacophony at the bar it was now a zoo in this thin and endless hall. More people must have disappeared with a girl on their arm than he had thought, though a few doors swung open and unlit even now, opportunities left untaken. The one next to his elbow could have rattled with the sudden and piercing shriek of ecstasy, and Armin’s whole body burned fiery red. 

Though he was certain he could not bear to see Eren like this, could not possibly attach his name to a figure being strangled and smothered by strangers, somehow Armin couldn’t bear to leave.

He just needed a glimpse. Though his heart quaked at the thought, though his mouth was dry and his legs turned to jelly and all he could think of was the look in the boy’s eyes as he was hauled away like an animal to slaughter, he took a step forward. Then another. He needed to be sure. He needed to know, for certain. For Carla. For Mikasa.

That idea swelled and stabbed at him in the most tender spots. This would have been her if it weren’t for Eren. Armin had a sudden vision of her thin lips coated in waxy red, her pale form tossed over tables, elegant hands lifting her skirts for whoever offered the fee. 

He gritted his teeth and pressed his ear to one door, and then the next. He needed a room with no women. The first that he found the occupants were moaning one another’s names so loudly that he could bypass it altogether. The second he had to work at deducing, peeking under the door and through the keyhole before he could spot that it was only one man and boy, and both of them blond. 

The third, and one of the last on this floor, was the winner. He could already hear three distinct voices from listening close to the wood. Armin fell silently to his knees and peered inwards through the keyhole. A broad and muscled back, twitching and contorting with languid use, blocked his view of the rest of the room. He saw a slender, olive skinned hand snake over the shoulder and grab at the skin. A throaty moan sounded. He could see the starting dip of the larger man’s rear, just above a tall wrinkle in the bed sheets. 

Naked. These were wholly naked men, together, all groans and wet noises, and Armin inhaled thinly through his nose when he saw a slender leg curl around the man’s waist. The alcohol sat heavy on the top of his head, and now it pushed and throbbed and thrust every ounce of blood he had into painting his whole face tomato red.

Soon he realized with great unease that he was at the wrong angle to see any of their faces. 

He wasn’t much for brute force or gymnastic feats with the 3DMG, but stealth, Armin could do. As softly as he could manage, he worked the handle. It wasn’t clumsy enough to click or thud as the lock unraveled, but he did worry about the door hinges. A thin sliver was the most leeway he was going to get.

And it wasn’t much. A fraction more than the keyhole afforded him, and largely the same view. Armin cursed to himself and tried pushing a little wider, heart thumping. 

Luck shone down on him then. The man rose, apparently dragging the smaller form between him and his companion upwards with him because a mess of dark hair rolled into view. He clasped it from the back and forced it upwards, kissing deeply (Armin clenched his legs together as a demanding pulse shot out from his groin), and when he drew back Armin saw those electrifying green eyes peering out under heavy lids and thick lashes, caught in a daze, his lips parted and kissed into rosy red. Armin was drowning in the sight, luxurious and sickening and in richer colors than the rest of life had the decency to afford him. Against the gaudy deep indigo of the wallpaper and the red dressings of the bed, the peach and pink skin and sunburnt shoulders of the men caging him between their bodies, the boy looked like a painting on the roofs of the Sina chapels. Too bright for reality. 

Then the reclining body behind him thrusted upwards and the boy flinched, and the way that his nose crinkled and his lips pressed together shot Armin back to the years of Shiganshina when Eren would get beat down in fights, or scrape his knees when he tumbled and he would scrunch his face up and valiantly fight to not cry, to be a big boy and shed no tears. Armin’s heart seized even as his pants went tighter around his aching groin, his head fuzzy and burdensome still, and his throat closed in a weak sob. 

He wasn’t crazy. He wasn’t just drunk and desperate and sad.

This reverie lingered even when his jacket twisted and yanked him back, strangling around the shoulders and neck, and Armin collided ruthlessly with the floor. A tall, swarthy man whose eyes were so deeply brown they seemed to be lightless, endless holes carved out of a sharply whittled face.

“Having fun peeping, are we? Peeping Tom.”

Armin gasped. The lethargy would not lift, and all that spilled out of him were futile, broken protests. “I – no – you see – this isn’t –”

The man cuffed him in the ear and Armin curled up in shock, covering his head. “NO, PLEASE—“

The door clicked shut and he was lifted from the collar like a kitten, and the man hauled him effortlessly back to the stairwell. 

They emerged from the rouge curtain back into the drunken ruckus of the bar, and those who saw them laughed and toasted him derisively.

“Good try, little man!” one bearded drinker called out.

“Armin!” He saw Jean, wasted completely but turning in alarm in the midst of a merry crowd. Armin thrust his arm out and called back.

They were at the door before he knew it, and then he was flying into the cobblestone. 

“Consider this a lesson in business,” the man snapped at him. “If you can’t pay, you can’t preview.”

Armin grimaced as he struggled to sit upright. “Do you have that written on your arm so you can remember it better?”

“Why you…”

He should have been enjoying some sharp toed kicks to the stomach by now, but a flurry of feet clopped down on the stairs to rush to his aid. Armin blinked and let himself be lifted by the arms. 

“Armin!” 

“So sorry, so sorry—“

“Marco don’t apologize, this ugly asshole just tried to—“

“Jean, leave it be!”

His handler was Bertolt, propping him to his feet and dusting his shoulders off as Reiner smoothly talked the man down. Marco was pushing Jean away from a potentially stupid decision, and Connie was just barely awake and trying to help Armin get settled too. Armin had to shoo him off his hair, which he was clumsily trying to flatten and part on the wrong side.

“I’m fine, I’m fine.”

The crew opted to part after that. They cursed the staff and drunkenly patted Armin on the back, nothing but sorry mans, what a welcome huh, what did you even do?

“I just…” Marco, who had been the one asking, was tilting on every other step and did not seem in fit mind to receive an honest answer. Armin bit his tongue and tried to wipe all traces of Eren (little Eren whose bright eyes devoured pictures of volcanoes and deserts and rare flowers in books, now pinned at the hips and pawing at men twice his size) from his mind. “I got lost, trying to find the restroom. He caught me upstairs.”

Jean stopped short. “You mean you saw… _people?_ ”

They collectively fell into a hush. Armin flushed red and proclaimed his innocence at the top of his lungs, but that did not deter the laughter and the back claps and the incessant pestering for details. This harassment continued until they reached the Stohess barracks, where they found Mikasa waiting on the steps with a silent glare for each and every one of them. A stony silence collapsed onto them.

“Did you have fun tonight?” she asked softly.

Several shifty glances were passed between them before anyone was brave enough to answer. “Uh,” Connie started. Then he remembered where Teagan’s mouth had been and paused to scrub peevishly at his face.

“It wasn’t that bad, Mikasa,” Reiner urged. “Just a little celebration for Armin, that’s all.”

“We remained pure!” Jean shouted. He was irregularly puce in the face and looking staunchly somewhere above Mikasa’s head. His fist was stuck to his chest in salute. “We drank and then we came back! Untarnished!”

Mikasa was less than impressed. She rose to her feet, gouged each of them with a cold and unforgiving stare, and gave her orders, “Get to bed. We’ve got drills first thing tomorrow morning.”

Armin didn’t bother filing in with the rest. He waited behind in resignation as they all left with bowed heads.

“She’s not our mom,” Connie protested, and was shushed from every direction.

Armin waited until they were gone to turn despairingly at her. “It wasn’t my idea.”

“A brothel?” she asked, the words now coming like delicate pricks from needles. There was a small but telling furrow between her brows. “Is that the kind of thing you like?”

Armin squared her in the eyes. She could intimidate the others, but not him. Not so much anymore. “Mikasa, I’m not that sort of guy.”

She watched him coolly. And a little sadly – the others might not be able to tell, too intimidated by her rank and skill and overall frigid demeanor. But she was still a girl. Armin had caught her once turning her face this way and that in a mirror, brows raised and lashes lowered as she swept her hair aside or up in a bunch on her head, and scowled when she did not find the result she wanted. He put his hands on her shoulders and wet his lips. “I mean it.”

No response came. She just watched him with her bitter eyes.

“But listen Mikasa, I need to tell you – tonight, at the brothel—“

“Save your stories for the boys,” she said tightly, and turned away from him for good. Armin chased after her without grace, still woozy from the booze.

“Wait! Mikasa!” 

He skidded into a wall inside the entrance, his feet distant and refusing to obey him wholly. She came back for him then and hefted him over her shoulder with ease. “You stink like Hannes used to,” she remarked dryly.

“That wasn’t my fault!” Armin cried. “Mikasa, put me down! I want to tell you something important!”

“Tell me in the morning when you stop stinking.”

And that was that. Her jostling only riled him more, turned his stomach, and though he was divided between heartbroken and humiliated and infuriated and hot confusion, he suddenly agreed. The morning would be best. The booze was hitting him harder now that he was off his feet and upside down.

She deposited him in his room, and Armin flopped into his bunk without protest. She helped him free of his boots, and he held his stomach as if to contain the rising bile there. 

“The morning,” he mumbled, one hand pressed dramatically to his rapidly wettening forehead. The sweat was cold and sickly. “Please listen to me in the morning.”

“Rest, Armin.”

All light evaporated from his room when she shut the door behind her, and Armin rolled into a feeble ball. 

Eren Yeager. Alive.

His pillow went wet under his eyes and he smiled with gritted teeth.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been doing some bare bones research as far as currency, era, and historical prostitution goes, but it's by no means thorough or infallible. If anyone reading knows better, I'm sorry. 8( 
> 
> The Thaler was a popular coin used for a couple of centuries in Germany. I'm estimating its value off of [this summary of a collegiate's expenses](http://www.amason.net/hessen/thaler.htm), though I'm also shitty with guessing at value with regular modern money anyway so. Yes. Trying here. 
> 
> And the thing about prostitutes having to have their clothing marked with stripes or sashes (or even wearing specific jackets or caps) was a [real requirement](http://www.academia.edu/1863385/A_Phenomenological_Analysis_of_Female_Prostitutes_Experience_of_Stigmatization) (page 8), as was the legalization of prostitution out of a necessity to prevent crime and improper conduct outside of legal matrimony. 
> 
> BUT if you notice any glaring inconsistencies, please let me know! I'm not going to go all out on historical accuracy because it is intended to be a pretty indulgent fic (and I've not got a great deal of time on my hands to spend hours doing all the research I probably need) but I do want to try where I can. In that vein, I realize it's unlikely that the women and boys would share a brothel, but I'm headcanoning that due to the constricted nature of life in the Walls and likelihood of homophobia there, it would be safer for all sex workers to share. And if anyone has links to good resources on male prostitution in history whatsoever, _please share._ I found one tenth of a blurb on livejournal and that was about it.
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoy! I'll respond to the previous comments later tonight, I've got to run at the moment. But thank you thank you thank you for your support! You're all adorable. |D

Eren could feel the petite hand mashing into his cheek before he could register that he was even remotely awake. He spoke without thought, muttering low and lazily. “Cassandra, get off.”

The little girl giggled and pushed his cheek into his lips, puckering them like a fish’s. He was awake then, zipping upright and swinging her down into the bed. “Cassandra why are you always such a little shit!”

The girl was a plain little thing with pin straight hair that teetered that strained line between brown and blond, and was cursed with a rather profusely pointed nose. She was ten years old and a brat to the marrow, buffering his foul language and attitude away with shrieks and giggles. “It lives! It lives!”

“Where’s your mom?” He demanded, eyes thin and aching from the unwelcome lamp she’d lit on his nightstand. 

“She kicked me out of the kitchen,” she said. 

“Well I’m kicking you out of my room. Tell your mom to make the griddlecakes with blueberries.”

“Raisins today,” Cassandra corrected, sticking out her tongue. Eren scowled and bodily lifted her off the blankets and onto the floor. 

“Get out if you can’t bring me good news for once.”

“Will you play cards with me later?”

“Never again. Get out.”

She left on flighty feet, giggling. Eren wondered if he ought to stop her. She had developed the nasty habit lately of making her way through every room and waking everyone long before anyone was fit to be woken. 

Then he decided he was all too sore to bother chasing after her, and only stretched languidly and fell back asleep. 

When he woke again half an hour later and trekked down to the kitchen, a fair number of the others had already eaten their fill and left their crumb sodden plates in the sink. Cassandra was finally doing as she was told, hair pinned back by a handkerchief and washing the floor boards in the hall with a soapy cloth and bucket. Eren mussed her handkerchief as he passed and relished in her whine of protest. 

“Why is it raisins again, Tilly?” he said blearily to the broadly hipped woman at the stove. She was one of the oldest whores at thirty two, and would likely have retired if she could afford it. Having given birth four times now she was all but bled dry, even with Cassandra doing a maid’s work to help earn her own keep. Two others had died quite young, but there was an older boy she’d had to give away. From Eren’s understanding he was enlisted in the military somewhere on the opposite end of Wall Rose.

“Because we still haven’t used them up. Be happy it’s me cooking today, all right?” She scooped him up a cake and ladled some tea for him out of the open pot on the stove. 

“You need to keep Cassandra out of our rooms in the morning,” Eren muttered. “She’s a menace.”

“Tell me how to raise kids when you’ve got one, you ungrateful ass.” 

Teagan, whose hair was piled shapelessly atop her head and her heavy eyes even lower lidded than usual, draped an arm over Eren’s shoulder and sipped at her own tea. “She’s a kid, Eren. You were worse.”

“I was not. I never bothered anyone like that.”

“No, you were just creepy. At least Cassie’s got a sense of humor.”

“Bite me.” 

Teagan opened her mouth wide and descended forbodingly towards his neck. Eren grunted and ducked away, nearly spilling his drink. Tilly and Teagan laughed as one.

Both of them joined him to eat, slumping into the small table with no trace of lady-likeness between them. Tilly munched on a half burnt cake that she had deemed unfit to serve anyone else and Teagan sipped delicately at her tea, the long sleeves of her elegant housecoat brushing the table every time she moved. Eren wolfed down his meal with no pretense for manners, and was reluctantly pleased to find that Tilly had been able to afford some cinnamon. At least that made the raisins more palatable today.

“Did that little guy ever find you last night?” Teagan asked abruptly.

“Huh?” Eren queried around a mouthful.

“There was a tiny blond boy last night asking after you. Cute little thing, button nose,” she said, tapping her own. Eren squinted quizzically at her.

“No? But I was drinking, so…” Eren furrowed his brows and frowned. After he’d gotten the living daylights pounded out of him by those two blacksmiths he’d turned to the hard spirits, numbing himself up for the rest of the night. “What’s his name?”

“Oh, fuck me if I can remember.”

“I’d rather not, I’ll catch what you’ve got.”

“Cockmuncher.” She kicked him fondly under the table. “He was a Military Police recruit.”

Eren groaned and shook his head. “Oh, no.”

“Sorry.” Teagan shrugged.

“You’re saying he was little though?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re talking about that piss-haired brat?” A lanky figure cast a damp shadow over their table. Adalbert, one of the shabbier doormen, was joining them. He ate his griddle cake squirrelishly from his hand rather than from a plate. His mug was his own, twice as large as those supplied in the cupboard and he always slopped it to the brim with tea. His only addiction, apparently, and no one could seem to make it strong enough for his liking. “That bite-sized police recruit?”

“Little one with the hair like a hood?” Teagan asked apprehensively. Tilly grumbled as crumbs flew over the table from his first bite. He chewed on obliviously in his barnyard fashion and frowned at Eren.

“You watch yourself, Eren. He was peeking in your door.”

“What?” squawked Teagan. 

“Are you kidding me?” Eren interjected, the infuriated thud of his mug on the wooden table rattling the rest of the plates.

“He snuck upstairs and was peeking in on you. Had to beat him and haul him out myself. Fuckin’ shocked you didn’t hear us, to be frank.” Adalbert snorted and ripped another piece off his cake. “I told the boss and we’re keeping an eye out, but you watch yourself. Remember what happened to Anselma.”

“Yes, but Anselma was a tease,” Tilly scoffed. “She invited that kind of attention, let’s be honest about it. Eren hates the police. He wouldn’t do that.”

“What happened to her, exactly?” Eren asked, suddenly uneasy. He had never heard the full story, Anselma having disappeared two years before he’d joined the brothel. There was something of a legacy about her, though, as her name was often invoked as a butt of a joke or a stifling reminder that quelled gossip to a standstill. 

“Oh, sweetie, don’t worry. She was a true idiot,” Tilly rolled her eyes. 

“She led one of those Unicorn turds on, and she paid the price. The man got jealous.” Teagan sucked her lips in, disapproving. “He spied on her and got so jealous, because he somehow did not grasp that the point of being a whore was to sleep with whoever paid you. And the next thing you know…” She waved her hand in the air. “Gone. And no one looks into it because it was one of their own that did her in.”

Eren stared. Teagan was giving him a needlessly pointed look – she knew better than to press her opinion on Captain Levi in front of a paranoid wreck like Adalbert, but she still badgered him about the man when she saw fit. Which was stupid because Captain Levi was hardly a creep. Staunchly the opposite, in fact. Eren wrinkled his nose at her and then turned to Adalbert, who nodded gravely at him. 

“You watch yourself, kid. This one might be young but that ain’t never stopped no one from being a right piece of work.”

Eren sipped his tea in a tense hush, downing it to the dregs. His eyes were narrowed. “I’m not afraid of some peeping shit rag. Police or not.”

*~*

The morning was a piercing, beastly invasion of light upon his face. It seemed to sear his eyes clean through the lids. Armin rolled over to face the wall and his head throbbed with the sudden shift. He moaned like a pitiful dying creature, and felt much the same.

His door rammed into the wall with a defeaning bang and Armin almost did die, startling upright with a suddenness that guaranteed a heart attack. 

“ARLERT!” barked the superior. Gerste? His head hurt too much to focus and he was still stuck in a fog, but he straightened his back and saluted from his bed. 

“YES SIR! HERE SIR!” 

“Good god, son, get in your gear and get moving! You’ve slept through breakfast!”

It was definitely Gerste. “Yes sir!” Armin affirmed again, albeit with less volume than before. His head was a riot of agony. 

The man scoffed and shut the door, muttering something about a bunch of kids and stupid teenagers, this and that, and Armin was half tempted to roll back over and hide under the covers until whatever fatal illness had befallen him would pass.

It was all Connie’s fault, he decided with a glower. Yes, Connie had shoved the bulk of that drink down his throat and he had been perfectly fine before, but that had certainly tipped him over the limit. And his ear hurt where the doorman had hit him after.

Armin paused. He’d been hit because he had been spying…

Then his headache was nothing but a minor set back as he swirled around his room with the speed of a falcon but none of the grace, clumsily shrugging into his clothes and and strapping on his belts. He wouldn’t need the gear, not today, but he needed to be presentable, and to catch Mikasa before she left.

He raced out the door and swallowed down his nausea. There was no time for sickness. 

The majority of his peers were already splitting off and departing in their respective groups. Mikasa was adjusting her boots on a bench with a stern face. Armin beelined for her.

“Mikasa!” he hissed as he broke into her midst. She caught him and held him upright impassively, as if she had been expecting his storm of an entrance. “Mikasa! I’ve got—“

“Slow down,” she said, her brows furrowed. “Aren’t you sick after last night?”

“Oh? Yes. But that’s not important,” he insisted, though her reminder brought his attention back to his aching belly. “Mikasa, may I speak with you before you go? It’s urgent.”

“What?”

“Mikasa!” Hitch – one of Armin’s least favorite first impressions among the recruits he did not know (the spread of several training camps throughout Wall Rose meant that not everyone here was a familiar or friendly face) was calling to them with her hands unnecessarily cupped around her mouth. “Don’t hold us up with your Handicap, okay! We’re leaving in two with or without you.”

And the impression only worsened, even if she hadn’t been the first one to call Armin by his unfortunate new nickname. Armin’s nose wrinkled in distaste but it was Mikasa who took it the furthest to heart. “I’ll give her a real handicap if she’s so keen to know one,” she seethed under her breath, eyes dark and cloudy.

“No, Mikasa, please listen. Nevermind her.” Armin took both of her hands in his and quivered as he worked up his courage. She blinked at him, stupefied. There was a curious rosy pink seeping into her cheeks. “I don’t know how to say this, but, um…”

“Armin?” she pressed softly.

“Last night—“ instantly she lost all gentility, and knowing her temper Armin pushed fast. “No, don’t look at me like that, it’s not what you think. I saw Eren last night.”

Mikasa said nothing. Her lips parted as if she might, but she only tilted her head by a single degree. Armin wet his lips and continued.

“I did. It’s him – he has Carla’s eyes. He’s alive. He’s working in that brothel, I talked to the girls there – they said it was him. I saw him go upstairs, I didn’t get a chance to speak with him, but Mikasa, Eren is _here._ He’s _alive._ ”

She continued her silence. Armin shivered, eyes wide. “Mikasa, are you listening? It’s Eren!”

“Armin.” There was something of Carla in her voice. Carla before the Titan attack, after Eren went missing and she started to brush Armin’s hair behind his ears and invite him over for dinner with relentless persistance. Mikasa withdrew her hands and put them on his shoulders. “Don’t do this.”

“What? Mikasa, I’m not making this up. It was him.”

“No, it wasn’t Armin.” She squeezed his shoulders. “Don’t do this to yourself again. You were drunk, okay?”

“No – I wasn’t that drunk! I know what I saw!”

“Armin, Eren is dead.” Mikasa took his face now, cupping his cheeks. “Eren is dead. He’s not here, or anywhere else.”

Armin pulled loose, stung by her insistence. She said it like he was going mad. “No, I swear. It was him. You weren’t there, Mikasa.”

“No, you weren’t there,” Mikasa said in a hush. Though her voice had lowered she was twice as viperous, each word a new sting. “Those men that took me when I was nine wanted me. They wanted my mother and I because we were valuable. They said they were looking for the last of the Japanese.” She touched at the red scarf, tied tight around her throat as it had been for as long as he could remember. “They killed my mother when she fought them to save me, and she was worth more than I was. What do you think they did to Eren when they found him in my place?”

Armin was speechless. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t thought the same after all this time. But it was an assumption that no one dared speak aloud, not in all six years since the incident. Grisha never said a word about it. Certainly not Carla or Mikasa. Only whispers of speculation that Armin caught from Hannes and others that swirled on the outskirts of the Yeager family, and in the way his grandfather had kissed the top of his head and told him to remember Eren as the brave boy he’d been. He used to dream about Eren being held up by the neck like a goose at a butcher’s: before the fall of Wall Maria the closest to killing he’d seen was watching the perfunctory skinning and parting of meat from bone for sale. He still had that dream once in a while, even if it wasn’t always Eren in the butcher’s grip anymore.

Now that he had quieted she relaxed, plying him with honeyed tones. “Please, don’t insult Eren by pretending to see him in other places. Don’t look for him. He’s not going to be there.” 

“Miiiikaaaasaaa!” Hitch cooed from the door. “Your loss if you’re not coming now!”

Mikasa sent a scowl back her way, and braced Armin with one more steely stare. “Please. Let him go, Armin.”

She hugged him then, and left him standing alone and gutted. She trotted to catch up to her crew and left with a small, dreary bow to her head. 

A hand clapped on his shoulder. Jean was watching Mikasa’s morose exit with an inquisitive frown. “Man, Armin, what was that about?”

The door emptied. Armin turned his scowl down to the bench she’d been adjusting her boots on. “Nothing, Jean.”

“You sure?” He waggled Armin by the shoulder. “Oi. We’re on duty together today, right? You could tell me all about it while we work. Or you can mope about it all day and piss off our supervisor.”

“You just don’t want to end up in a group with someone who’ll make you look stupid,” Armin said wearily. Though it was far too late to prevent that. He was still hopelessly behind everyone else in every aspect, and none of the superiors took kindly to him thus far. He was the embodiment of a charity case.

“That’s right. So let’s get you looking smart for my sake, huh?” He snaked his arm around Armin’s shoulders completely and steered him away from the benches. “We all look like shit after last night to start with. You know Marco threw up three times this morning?”

“Really?”

“Huge greasy chunks, everywhere. He’s staying behind to clean up his bunk.”

Armin balked with a pained outcry. “I didn’t need to know the consistency!” 

Jean laughed and pushed him along.

*~*

By lunch they were both feeling heaps better. Although Jean had been less affected than Armin, he had moved around that morning with certain lethargy that didn’t become his usual boisterousness. They both gratefully departed from their group for a small bakery nearby, and bit into hot buns as they leaned against the wall outside.

Armin had been reluctant to say anything about what he and Mikasa had been discussing, though Jean spent the better part of his day pushing for it. He was always so keen on all matters Mikasa, to the point where up until halfway through their second year it had seemed like Jean would never warm to Armin. If Armin hadn’t intervened and explained that Mikasa was more a sister than a girlfriend, and that he, personally, had no issues with Jean until Jean had decided to have issues with him, they might have been pointlessly at an impasse for much, much longer than necessary. But following that Jean had become a rather close friend, and so had Marco by proxy. Armin was extraordinarily grateful for it. He was rather loathe to return to the days of being all but friendless save for Eren, and then Mikasa. The warmth with which the 104th trainees received him was unexpected, but welcome beyond measure.

It didn’t mean he was so eager to divulge anything about Eren yet.

“Your being mysterious like this is really annoying, you know?” Jean announced with a monstrous bite of his bun. “Did Mikasa say something to you last night?”

“No,” Armin said with his head bowed and his lower lip caught in his mouth. Having been famished he had already finished his bun, and was now just loitering for Jean’s sake. “It’s not…it’s complicated.”

That stirred Jean’s suspicion. “Complicated how?”

“Not in that way,” Armin hurried. “I told you. She’s family to me. You still don’t trust me?”

“No, I know you don’t feel that way, but she…” Jean winced and looked to the heavens. “Speaking honestly Armin, I’m not sure she’s on the same line of thinking as you.”

“She’s fine. I’m the problem. This time, I mean.” Not that he was entirely convinced that she was right, but in the light of day his doubts were seeping in again. He didn’t want Eren to be in a whorehouse. He didn’t want to think about him with those men he’d seen, and it almost seemed a kindness to accept him as dead instead, but Armin had seen him. For certain. He’d been drunk but not enough to drive him to idiocy.

Well. Following him upstairs had been stupid. But aside from that his judgment had been pretty sound. He closed his eyes and let his head thud back against the stone wall.

“Hey. Across the street, by the tannery.” Jean nudged him with an elbow and Armin popped to attention. “You think she was at the bar last night?”

“What?”

“She’s got a yellow sash. You know that’s how you can tell, right? By law, prostitutes are supposed to wear a yellow stripe or sash somewhere on their clothes so you can tell who they are. If they catch a girl pulling tricks without one, she gets fined or jailed.” Jean poked him again and pointed hastily, withdrawing the finger before anyone could catch him at it. “There, over there. The redhead. They had red sashes out in Trost, you know? I guess in Sina they changed the colors for some reason. Maybe because red is more for the royalty.”

Armin looked. The mop of auburn curls stuck out of the crowd like a chapel tower, unmistakable. Hopeful, he pulled himself off the wall, and gasped when she turned.

“That’s her! It’s her! Jean,” He snarled his hand in the taller boy’s sleeve and tugged, “Wait for me.”

“What? Armin!” But Armin had bolted, crossing the street without care for carriages or pedestrians. He could still hear Jean shouting at him. “Why are you – she’s not even that pretty! Come back here!”

He hoped for both his sake and Jean’s the woman hadn’t heard that. She didn’t seem to notice. She had her arm threaded through the handle of a woven basket and was busy rearranging the contents when Armin caught up to her. 

“Rita!”

She jumped, whipping around and nearly smacking him with the basket. She was baffled for a moment, wide eyed as she searched him for a hint of familiarity, then she cocked her head and frowned. “Oh. You.”

“Rita – I’m sorry to bother you like this in the street,” Armin said hastily. A lot of people had turned to watch. Some were chuckling – probably because he was a handspan shorter than the woman and at least five years younger, and considering her obvious occupation it did not make for a very dignified scene. “I am hoping to have a moment of your time? If it’s not too much trouble. It’s urgent.”

“Honey, why not just come back tonight when I’m working? I’d love to help you out but this isn’t how it works.”

Armin flushed ferociously from his nose to his ears. “N-no! I’m not trying to purchase…that is…please, it’s private, may I speak with you somewhere privately?”

“What for?” She had her hip cocked, basket resting on it and was smirking down at him in a way that made Armin want to run, and run far. He wasn’t fit to be talking to women like this. Girls, yes. Girls could be and were frequently his friends, but Rita, though not as comely as some, had a certain sharpness to her that made Armin feel like he was being carved out of his clothes and hoisted on a stake. The crimson stain on her lips was impossible to look away from. “Sweetheart, no need to be shy. We’ve already met under shadier circumstances than this.”

“I…” Their audience was dissipating, but it was still an audience. Stolen peeks through bargaining with vendors and smirks and chuckles. Searing distaste in the sneers of passing women. Armin turned to look back at Jean, who started flinging wild gestures his way in an effort to summon him back. He didn’t see, however, anywhere in the immediate vicinity where they could get a hint of privacy. Unless he were to invite her to a drink or a bite to eat, and the implications of that might give him an anuerism. Armin settled for staring at his feet and the edge of her skirt, and pretended that the world was small and empty enough to be contained there. “It’s about Eren. I’d like to speak with Eren.”

She made a quiet humming sound. He wasn’t sure what it meant, and she didn’t say anything to clarify.

“If that would be possible. I mean. Could you…maybe you could arrange for us to meet. Outside of the, uh, establishment? I’d just like to speak with him, that’s all, and I’m not trying to buy…that is not to say that I think that it’s bad, I assume you both are, uh. Fair. For your occupation. Not fair, I mean, but I’m just…I only want to talk. Is that allowed?” Armin paused, flummoxed. “I suppose I’d still have to pay?”

“Didn’t I say last night? You should leave it alone,” Rita tutted and switched her hips. “Sweetie, you can look me in the eye when you’re talking to me. I’m not gonna bite.”

He obeyed with no small reluctance. He heard Jean shout his name from across the street and winced. “Please. It’s important.”

Rita was virtually unreadable. She had a brow coyly cocked and her smile was crooked and devious, but Armin got the feeling that it was simply her version of deadpan. Teasing even when she wasn’t intending to be: a well rehearsed distraction. And there was no reason he could think of that she should be so defensive over Eren, unless she was hoping to deter him from seeing the boy in hopes that he would spend money on her instead. A little competition within the ranks.

Still…

Finally, she answered. “You know, the best way to get him would be to come back for a visit.”

“I can’t,” Armin choked. “Not like that.”

Rita snorted. “Silly. I mean with my help. I heard about your little escapade upstairs.” At his mortified look she patted his shoulder, tutting again. “Oh, come on, don’t give me those eyes. No one can blame you, a boy your age. But you’re not going to be welcome back until the doormen forget your face. Might need some time for that.”

“Then why can’t I meet him out here? In the daylight?”

“It’s improper. Honestly, you ought not to be talking to me unless there’s a _problem._ ” Armin could feel the bump of his heart against his bones when she ran the tip of her pristine nail over the patch on his jacket pocket. The ensignia of the Military Police. “It’s not illegal, but it’s frowned upon, you know. Especially with the boys. The boys are dirtier than the women, some think. I think we all would rather avoid more attention than we already get.”

It made some sense. Prostitution wasn’t illegal. Just like Jean said, if you were registered and properly outfitted you could fairly participate in it without arrest. It was even deemed a necessity by the crown, keeping unmarried men, the widowers, and lonely soldiers occupied. Still Armin fidgeted uneasily. “I’m not sure…”

“I could get you in. I can slip you into his room and you could speak privately there, and no one will be any wiser,” she promised. Then with a wicked grin, “For a price, of course.”

Armin considered it. “You would do that? For me?”

“For money.”

She was being honest, at least. “And no one would interrupt?”

“That I cannot guarantee.” She released him from her pointed gaze and sent a saucy wink across the street to Jean, who instantly retreated to the safe wall of the bakery and pretended not to have seen. “If he catches someone’s eye he’s going to have to earn his keep.”

“You can’t tell him I’m waiting there?”

“Sweetie, you can’t tell any of us _not_ to do our job. If you want to make sure you have him all to yourself, you pay the full price. And your pockets are a little light for that, aren’t they?”

“But not too light for you to take your fill,” Armin said bitterly. 

“I’ll be generous. How about ten thalers? Nice and cheap, one time only price for the safe passage of one police recruit in—“

“And out,” Armin cut in.

“—And out of our most esteemed ‘establishment.’ What do you say?”

It was hardly cheap, but Armin supposed he had no choice. He licked his lips, held out his hand to shake, and did not flinch when her grip turned out to be formidible and firm. 

“Tonight, then. Meet me at the corner of the Wallist’s church, ten o’clock sharp, and bring the money. Don’t wear your uniform.”

Though Armin still loathed the idea that Rita would be single-handedly in charge of his safety and did not entirely trust her to keep her word, he agreed with no more than a nod. Rita fluttered her lashes, whispered a thanks, and abandoned him with a sway in her hips. 

When he trotted back to Jean the other boy was beside himself, throwing his hands up in the air. “What did you do? What is wrong with you!”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Armin insisted. “She’s going to do me a favor.”

“What ‘favor’?” Jean spat out the word as if it were a meal worm he’d found in his bun. “Armin, it’s not safe. You’re going to get sick, you realize that? They’re not clean people.”

“I’m not asking for her services!” Armin balked and raised his hands to shush Jean. 

“Then why are you even talking to her?” Jean was raking his fingers through his hair, threatening to tug it out by the root. “Last night was fun but there’s a time and a place for that sort of thing. Right? I thought if anyone was going to be that stupid, it would be Connie! But you?”

“Jean, it’s not any of your business, and it’s not what you think!” Armin tugged his sleeve, trying to calm him down. “I just need to speak with someone there, and she can guarantee it. That’s all.”

Jean stared at him as if he had only just realized that Armin smelled like the bad end of a barn. “Who could you possibly have to speak to down there?”

Armin scowled and began to push at him. Their lunch hour was nearly passed, and they ought to return to duty. “Just keep quiet and don’t say anything. I’ll tell you after tonight if you’re going to keep badgering me.”

“You are not going back there.”

“And why not?”

“Well for one, you got kicked out last night, and two, how can you do this to Mikasa?” Jean was taking shorter strides than normal. Ordinarily Armin would have to trot a little to keep up but he was slowing down to a straggling gait, just to properly ream out Armin in his frenetic, hissing sermon. “Didn’t she pull all kinds of favors to get you up here with us? What if you get in trouble over there and they throw your sorry carcass back over Wall Sina where it belongs?” 

Armin bit his lip and walked faster. “I won’t get in trouble.”

Unlikely. Jean had a fair point about this looking badly on his record, and for all her friendliness last night Rita seemed altogether a different creature in the light of day. And even if he should manage to get to Eren’s room unscathed – what should he do? Wait there until Eren came up with some drunken barbarian in tow?

“You could at least get someone to go with you,” Jean persisted. “You’re going to get ripped to bits by yourself. Look at you.” He pressed his hand on the top of Armin’s head to point out once again that he was roughly the size and shape of a thirteen year old girl. Armin was tempted to swat it off and tell him a thing or two.

Instead he stopped altogether, squinting upward at his taller friend. Considering.

Eren wouldn’t _have_ to bring a barbarian.

Jean paused, furrowing his brows. He removed his hand. “Armin? Why are you looking at me with those eyes?”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The unofficial title for this chapter is "The Tender Teardrops of Jean Kirschtein's Soul."

“There isn’t much point today, is there?” Armin sighed. “I came here to tell you something important and you’re not even listening to me.” He watched her jerk her head to hear something he wasn’t privy to. 

“It’s not, it’s not the same thing.” His throat tightened as she frowned. The grooves around her mouth deepened. Every line on her face looked to have been traced there in ink, a far cry from five years earlier when she was still comely and mostly attentive. “Hey. You don’t know anything about that.” 

She stiffened, and started slapping the wall. “You shut up! You don’t know anything about that! You don’t know anything!”

“Aunt Carla!” Armin snapped, at her side in a flash and holding both her hands. “Aunt Carla you don’t need to do that.”

“Let go!”

“Aunt Carla, I’m right here. Look at me instead.” She had to have her fidgets and her angry huffing but she was looking Armin in the eye, and she wasn’t wresting her arms free. “Are you going to listen to me?” 

“Please let go of me, Eren.”

“Armin.”

Her nose crinkled in distaste. “I don’t like that.”

“All right, then. Eren.” Armin released her. She didn’t resume her banging but she did glare at the wall. Whatever gnattering she heard behind it was unkind, but not threatening. He’d endured enough of that from her to know the difference by now. “I’ll come by tomorrow then. I have something I want to tell you.”

“No no no, you don’t leave.” Still angry, but tugging at him now so that Armin found himself clumsily perched over her lap, braced on the bed before she could pull him down and coddle him like a kitten. “It’s lonely here, Eren, and you and Mikasa aren’t here and it’s small. I don’t like it, it’s so small in here. We ought to open a window. Or move again, we could move again.”

“We can’t move. And it's a very nice room, I hadn't expected you to get one on your own. You could be sharing with several people, that's how its done at some places. It will be all right. I’ll tell the doctor to get you out in the garden more.” Carla snorted and at last succeeded in yanking Armin into her embrace. Her legs might be useless, but the strength in her arms remained formidable. A small groan escaped him. “Auntie Carla, I have to go. I’ll be back tomorrow, all right?”

She let him loose a little, but her lonely grip still lingered on his wrist. She pulled at it in short tugs and implored him with heartbroken eyes. “Longer tomorrow. All right? It’s lonely here.”

He kissed her cheek and let her kiss his, and then took his leave with his head bowed. The doctor accosted him halfway down the hall about the banging with apologies for not being able to intervene in time.

“It’s all right, I’m used to it. She’s done worse.”

“She is improving. Especially now that both of you are here,” he said impassively. There was a faintness about his every expression that seemed as if the man himself was very far away, and left his body to drift around on basic functional orders. Armin supposed that kind of separation was necessary, considering what he had to deal with all day. “She is fortunate, too, to have such good children. A fair number of my patients never see visitors. ”

“Well. Thank you.” Armin shrugged off the compliment. The doctor had to know that she was mother to neither of them, not by blood, but he didn't bother to correct him. It might look if she had adopted the both of them but Carla had only ever been a true mother to Mikasa. By the time Grisha had vanished and Armin’s grandfather had been lost to the Titans, Carla wasn’t fit to look after anyone. If anything he and Mikasa became her caretakers, in some awful, twisted sense. Armin conceded to calling her Aunt like Mikasa did, but that was the line he drew – especially when she had started confusing him with her real son.

And that, he thought bitterly as he trotted down the steps out of the building, was what made it so frustrating when he had to consider what he was going to do tonight and what he had planned to tell her just now. His end goal wasn’t clear. He’d like to reunite them. Beyond his own hopes to reclaim his friend and what Mikasa might feel, what Eren might think if he saw them again, what Armin wanted most was to give Carla back her real son. 

But would it be the right thing to do? Would it shock Carla into worse states? And would it be more merciful to leave Eren out of the loop, rather than to show him his mother with her withered legs and roving mind, locked away in an asylum? 

Should he even be bothering Eren? Maybe he had built a home here. Just because Armin had missed him and didn’t approve of the brothel (to state it politely) didn’t give him just cause to trample into Eren’s life without warning. He couldn’t be a sure judge without any evidence that Eren was truly unhappy. Or even the real Eren.

Armin stopped at a nearby post, resting his forehead against the cool metal. It was a blissful relief, albeit a small one. He had flipped his stance on the issue at least thirty times since noon, and his brief argument with Jean had only instilled more doubts in his mind. Maybe it wasn’t worth it. Maybe Mikasa was right, and it was all just wishful thinking and a timely case of uncanny resemblance. 

He snapped his fingers a few times, still leaning and deep in thought. Armin huffed. Would he ever be satisfied without knowing for certain?

The matter continued to dog him, keeping him reticent through supper and the rest of the night, but he still found himself treading the cobblestone up to the church steps at ten o'clock exactly. Rita posed for him there, one arm propped on her hip and the other extending out for the ten thalers he owed her. Her grin was sinful.

“Are you ready to be reunited with your lost lady love?”

“He’s a boy, and he’s not my love.” Armin sourly pressed the coins in her hands.

“Pardon the expression, then.” She pocketed the money and summoned him to follow. “I’ll send him up when I see him, but if he gets a customer before I catch him you’re going to be getting a show.”

Armin bit his lip. “Don’t worry, I think I’ve worked that part out.”

*~*

Jean Kirschtein would do a lot of things for his friends. Maybe too many things. As it so happened. His eyes twitched this way and that around the bar, watching the thinned out crowd of a Sunday slump and thought not for the last time that he wanted to die of shame.

Armin was going to owe him favors forever. New leather shoes. Fifty arranged dates with Mikasa. Twenty percent of his salary. Free beers for the rest of his life. 

He was clad in simple sandy trousers with a collared button shirt, dyed in a burgundy that he hoped didn’t veer too close to women’s violets or maroons. He had left his uniform folded neatly in his bedside drawer back at the barracks. Foremost, he was hoping that he would never be recognized again by anyone he encountered tonight. To aid on that front he had borrowed some of Marco’s clothes (without permission, but he could get that later) and even swiped one of his caps. Wearing something entirely not his own also helped him feel like it was a costume. A character he was playing for Armin’s sake, because there was no way the real Jean Kirschtein would ever find himself in this sordid predicament.

“I’m looking for a boy named Eren?” he managed to squeeze out, though he had trailed off at the end and reached an embarrassingly high pitch. The bartender looked him up and down. Jean sweated under his cap and wondered if he was piecing together his features. He almost added, “I definitely wasn’t here last night,” but that would be suicidal.

Thankfully, the man only jutted his thumb at a table to the far left, and all Jean had to do was nod and walk away on his suddenly wooden legs. 

A few paces in he realized he hadn’t truly looked in the direction the bartender pointed and now had to scan around for the right guy. He found nothing – he was going to have to go back and ask again, wasn’t he? Should he just turn away now? Should he just leave? He’d pay back Armin later, really, he would make it up to him somehow. And truth be told it was unfair of Armin to send him on such a gross mission while still skimping on the details as to why. It was an old friend from Shingansina, the smaller boy had admitted sheepishly, and that had shut Jean up because he could remember the droves of hollowed out refugees piling into Trost, and the food shortage that followed. He remembered the damning mission to reclaim Wall Maria thereafter that weeded out the old and the sick and the excess and how he’d seen wiry looking kids and the freshly widowed crying in the streets, even if his mother told him not to stare. So he had shut his mouth, telling himself not to say a word out of respect, and agreed to find Armin’s friend.

But once they had split ways for the night Jean’s reverence for tragedy dwindled. His doubts rose the closer he came to the brothel, and skyrocketed once he had pushed through the doors and felt unsavory gazes turn his way. 

Why would a Shingansina boy get access to life in Wall Sina? There were enough dregs even here to pick from when it came to filling the Police’s whore roster – they had been briefly educated on the matter and the list was available to every officer and trainee, as illegal prostitution was always a problem – and enough of the refugees struggled to get that kind of work in the streets out in Wall Rose. There were simply too many of them. Why should this Eren be an exception? And all shyness aside, was it really necessary for Armin to hide in his room like a criminal, waiting to strike? What was stopping him from just asking to buy Eren’s time himself? Something was fishy.

Besides all that, it ought to be Reiner doing this. No one would ever mess with Reiner or try to humiliate him if they found out he was trying to pick up a boy whore, because Reiner was the size of a house and could bend all opposition into a pretzel (and he was questionable anyway, what with how Bert was always latching onto him like a leech), whereas Jean was tough but he knew he was the gentleman’s sort of handsome, the kind that people might _question_ , and his palms were sweating and his heart was about to explode and he was sure that prostitute over there was giving him the side eye, she could probably tell just by looking at him that he was here for a boy and not a woman, and he ought to run right now, he ought to leave, all right he was turning around and leaving right now, goodbye Armin.

Except then someone moved, a huddle dispersed, and he saw him. 

Armin’s description had been sparse at best. ‘Eren’, as he was called, would be a boy roughly smaller than Jean but bigger than Armin (not a hard feat), dark brown hair, slim and green-eyed. There had been exceptional emphasis put on the eyes and now Jean knew why. The lean figure slumping into a chair and nursing a pint by his lonesome was all weary eyed, but still bright. The first thing Jean noticed was the vibrant green of those eyes, tired and heavy as they were.

Jean supposed you had to be the pretty sort to get work here. You had to look young and girly, that’s what most men liked in young boys, right? There was some kind of preference for youth because when they got older they became broad and square jawed and you couldn’t really pretend it was like being with a girl then. Wasn’t that the draw? It was supposed to be some kind of…substitution. He assumed. Jean was woefully undereducated on the subject but that was the impression he’d had pushed upon him by overheard discussions amongst other officers and trainees, and the way men at home would scoff about namby pambies inside Sina and their perverted tastes in company. This Eren guy fit the bill so tightly, small and lithe and his big girly eyes and shaggy hair.

The boy’s eyes flicked his way. And stuck. Jean startled. Shit, he’d been staring hadn’t he?

The boy raised a brow at him. 

Oh.

Could he still run?

Jean cleared his throat uneasily. No. Running would be even more suspicious. The bar was so much quieter tonight than it had been the night before, everyone would notice. And Armin would be stuck upstairs alone – if that Rita woman had kept her word rightly. He might be afraid, but he couldn’t abandon his friend like that. Though Armin was still getting a legendary earful later, mark his words.

So Jean moved forward, each step drawing him closer to the gallows. The air became more and more shallow the closer to the table he got, and when he finally reached it he found the power of speech had all but been lost to him. 

“Ei…” he croaked. He could feel the blood swirl into his cheeks.

“Hi,” said the boy. He took a long sip of his drink, gaze never leaving Jean’s face. Jean wished he would stop staring, it was only making him go redder. He could not feel his toes. That was a bad thing right? Maybe he was on the verge of a fit. Maybe he was going to drop and they’d have to usher his seizing body out of here to a doctor’s and he’d have to apologize to Armin, but it wouldn’t be his fault because how could he help getting suddenly and inexplicably ill?

The pronounced silence probably meant he should be talking. Jean’s eyes flicked to the empty seat. “I…” His head shook. His shoulders were drawing up to his ears, they were so stiff.

“It’s not taken, if that’s what you’re wondering,” the boy supplied. The offending chair then slid out smoothly just for Jean, seemingly of its own volition, but Jean caught the boy’s foot pushing on the chair leg below the table. Did he practice doing that in his spare time? What a dirty trick.

He supposed he had no choice now. Jean cleared his throat and gingerly took the seat, folding his hands on his lap before thinking better of it and putting them flat and bracing on the table. He’d look like a prissy lady otherwise.

Armin had warned him not to say a word of his being in hiding, not even to tip off Eren. There might be someone listening, he had explained, and Rita herself could not guarantee that either one of them would be welcome patrons at the bar after this. Which spoke highly of illegal doings and did nothing to ease Jean’s nerves, leaving him to continue under the pretense that he was actually interested in…things.

How did one start this sort of conversation? 

“I’m Jean,” he managed at last. No squeaking now, fortunately. Except he ought to have used a fake name. _Shit, cocks, son of a titan’s arsehole…_

“Eren,” he said. Jean’s last volley for freedom fluttered out the window. No mistaken identities, then. “Is it your first time?” The boy, who was clearly winded and in no mood for playing the game he was paid to, still tossed his hair and eyed Jean coyly from the side as he downed his drink. It was doing nothing to stop his heart from clawing its way into his throat. 

“For what?” Jean countered uneasily.

“Being in a brothel.” Eren didn’t smile, but popped his brows in a way that suggested he was tempted to. “Or approaching a boy.”

“I…well…you see…” Jean stopped, winced, and dropped his face into his hands. He couldn’t do this.

Then there was something cool and rigid pushed into his elbow, wetting his sleeve. Eren had pushed the rest of his ale at him. “Have a drink. It’s okay.” Jean watched him through the cracks of his fingers apprehensively. Eren was still looking thoroughly unimpressed. “Go ahead. You look like you’re going to get shot or something.”

Jean wanted to protest that, but he wanted a stiff drink more. He took the mug and gulped down a hefty portion. A quarter was left by the time he clinked it down. “Sorry,” he muttered sourly.

“Whatever. I offered.” Eren shrugged and pulled the mug back for a much more restrained sip than Jean had taken. “How old are you?”

“Uh.” Jean shook his head. “Fif—eighteen?”

“Fifteen?” Eren said. He was smiling now, even if only by halves. Jean felt all the more a fool for it. “Me too.”

Jean’s throat went dry. Well, naturally they would be the same age. Roughly. Armin was fifteen too. He summoned the drink again but took a smaller swig so that Eren could have the last bit for himself. Fifteen. Jean licked his lips and studied the wooden grain of the table as he cupped the mug between his hands, pulse hammering. “So then how did you…um. Were you…”

“How did I get here? Is that what you’re asking?” Eren pushed. Jean fidgeted before nodding. Eren’s smile was gone again. “That’s not the question you want to ask me.”

“No?” Jean asked, dumbfounded.

“No.” Eren leaned forward on his elbows. His eyes were stripping Jean to the core. “Try again.”

“Um…” Jean squeezed the mug. The weight of the coins in his pocket seemed to double and sag off his pant leg like an iron manacle. Eren, maddeningly, dropped his head by a fraction and Jean couldn’t stand how big those eyes looked now. He had really long lashes. Dark too. And his hair was definitely too long for Jean’s taste: even if they parted in the center the bangs brushed at his brows the same way Sasha’s did, so that every glance looked covert and flirtatious even if they weren’t trying for it. Armin’s was far longer, but at least it was tidy.

“I’m all ears,” Eren said plainly. “I don’t care if you’re young. Lots of them are.”

Jean wasn’t sure he was hearing right. “Really?”

Eren shrugged again. “Yeah. Lots. Sometimes they want practice before they get married.”

Practice. _Lord. Oh god._

“Or we could have another drink, Jean,” Eren offered. “It might help unclench your asshole.”

Jean was lost in a whirlwind of spluttering and Eren had the gall to sit there snickering at him. Jean coughed into his fist and was forced to drink the last of the ale to soothe down the fit, and decided that he really hated Eren. A lot. Armin was wasting his time on this smug bastard and he ought to march up to the room right now to tell him to get out while he still could.

Then Eren’s foot was pawing at his pant leg and Eren was sitting up a little, clutching his chin in his hands and grinning like a fox in a hen coop. “Don’t get pissy. It’s just a joke. I only wanted to see you smile.”

That foot wandered higher. Jean stopped breathing as it edged inward, rubbing the inner seam along his thigh with ponderous pressure. 

He could not take another minute of this. 

The satchel of coins teleported from his pocket to clank on the table so swiftly even Jean himself had to wonder how they got there. His white knuckled grip on the scratchy burlap did not make them seem any more real. Eren blinked at the satchel, then settled his hand over Jean’s all too softly.

“Was that so hard?” he said. Jean could have punched him square in his stupid nose. 

Instead he followed without a word, eyes fixed on the ground in front of him, as Eren led him by the hand to the rouge curtain beside the bar. Maybe it was his imagination but some slurring, drunken asshole nearby seemed to be calling to them, asking if he could watch. Jean refused to acknowledge anything but his own footsteps and how much he loathed the feel of Eren’s fingers cupping his own. At least he had the mercy to let go once they hit the stairs.

The hall wasn’t an exaggeration. Armin had warned him that the walls weren’t soundproof in any capacity, but Jean still startled when he realized that the squeaking noise was from a bed frame. He had never heard any woman alive make sounds like the ones he was hearing now. Literal barks on a staccato beat. Eren had to turn and snag him by a wrinkle in his shirt to keep him from gawking.

“Oi. Did you just come up here to listen to everyone else having fun?” 

“Is fun what we’re calling…”

“ _OH GOD, YES!_ ” 

The abrupt scream from a nearby door had him jumping, backing away a step with his heart hammering and a familiar and oh so unwanted rushes to his lower extremities, so he was quite unprepared when Eren pulled him down, one hand on the back of his neck.

And there went his first kiss. Wet, heated, with zero skill or effort on his end and all too much on Eren’s, the smaller boy’s tongue curling around his own as he stood as still and impotent as a scarecrow. It started and ended like the snap of a bullet, too quick to dodge and gone before he knew what had happened. Eren was still much too close, their noses almost brushing and his voice gone wispy. “It’s a lot better firsthand. Trust me.”

He let go of Jean. He walked away. Eren was prying open a door of his own near the end of the hall, but Jean was stuck in place, red as a tulip from the collar up and gone bug eyed.

That had been his very first kiss. It had been stolen from him by a _boy._

Jean was going to scream. And then die. Right here on this floor, tragic and long before his time. They’d sing songs and tell parables of his woeful tale around campfires and pints of ale for years to come. 

“Jean.”

Except he had to finish this first. He wasn’t sure what was going on with his face anymore. It was such a flurry of prickles and heat and dizziness, he could be flushing harder or draining to gray and be none the wiser to either one. Only through the power of miracles and visions of Armin’s doom did he find the will to put one foot in front of the other, and drift past Eren into the room.

It was empty. A bed with plush sheets, a wardrobe. A modest bedside table with a plain oil lamp on top, and a trunk at the foot of the bed. Weirdly enough there was a smattering of books in stacks on the floor. No Armin, but the wardrobe was large and could likely hide a person inside.

God help him if this was the wrong room. Jean would flood Sina with his tears if it was the wrong room. 

He was proud to say he did not jump again when Eren closed the door behind him, the latch catching rather loudly, but he did stiffen when the other boy put his hands to his shoulders and steered him down to sit on the bed. His cap was pried off, tossed aside on the blankets. He’d have to wash everything before giving it back to Marco, come to think of it. Who knew what had been on these sheets?

“You’re uncomfortable?”

“Uh. A little.” Jean felt a fresh wave of sweat at his brow and staunchly kept his gaze elsewhere. Ought he mention now what he was here for? Was Eren aware that he had a visitor lying in wait somewhere? Perhaps not, because he wasn’t looking around or demanding that Jean spill the beans. 

Jean’s focus was entirely on the wardrobe. There was a thin crack between the doors there. And there – if he squinted, he could just see –

Oh thank the heavens there was movement. Slight, but real. And he could see just enough in the sliver of darkness to tell it was a human. He pursed his lips at the figure within. _Armin you get the hell out here right now or I am going to kill you…_

Eren had shifted his legs. Jean’s knees were knocked together, nestled between Eren’s as the boy straddled him while still standing. Both of his hands came to Jean’s cheeks, tilting his head up so that Jean had no choice to look into his eyes. Wide and green, deep green. 

Sharp, though.

“You don’t have to be nervous, Jean.”

This was getting into dangerous territory. Should he say something? Call to Armin, give him some kind of signal? Or maybe he was imagining things. With a small startle he flicked his eyes back to the wardrobe. Armin should have sprung out by now to rescue him. He hadn’t invented some figure in the crack earlier out of desperation, had he?

Or was Armin, as Jean was starting to fear, hidden in a completely different room and now he was stuck going through with this horrifying, life-ruining endeavor? Because if Eren wasn’t expecting it he was fairly certain it would not go over well if he stopped to say something like: “Oh pardon me, I just have to check if my friend is in the wardrobe like he promised, the whole point was to sneak him in here after all.” He would get thrown out of the brothel and there would be inquiries within the police ranks and he’d get sent back to Trost under dishonorable discharge and his mother would be so incredibly mad at him, he would never outlive the shame.

Eren was leaning down to his ear. One of his hands had trickled down to his chest, over his thudding heart. Armin needed to come out right now because Jean could not go a single step further with this. He’d already been kissed by this asshole, anymore than that was going to qualify as some kind of assault. He was certain of it.

Eren’s breath was hot, hitting like arrows against his ear. “Unless you've got a friend hiding in here for me.”

Jean froze. He turned his head, catching Eren’s eyes.

There had been some alien shift there. He didn’t even look like the same boy that had dragged him up here and kissed him senseless outside. There was a pointedness to his stare, a rigidity around the line of his mouth, that reminded Jean of an animal crouching, waiting. Volatile.

“So you do know about—“

Eren didn’t spare him the chance for questions. Jean did have just enough time to think that maybe he should have taken hand to hand combat more seriously, because then he might have a clever maneuver at the ready to dodge or even turn the hit back on Eren, instead of taking the backhanded swing to his cheek like a guileless child. The nerves there lit up like fire on whiskey as he fell to the bed, stunned and in pain. The warmth of his legs around his own vanished, and Jean sloppily propped himself upright to see Eren pull a small knife from the back of his trousers, thin to better conceal itself but gleaming and sharp, just before he kicked the side of the wardrobe with a raucous bang. 

The doors swung open. A mess of limbs fell out with a sharp yelp. Eren was immediately on top of it, snatching a clump of blond hair and swinging a leg over the fallen boy’s back so that he could pin him from above, pulling his head up and pressing the point of the knife to the jumping pulse in the boy’s neck. Eren stared down Jean from over the boy’s head, not sparing so much of a glance at his prey. 

Armin was gobsmacked. Panting, shaking, afraid to move. 

“Don’t!” Jean hollered, stretching out a hand. Eren only jerked Armin higher and more cruelly, the knife pressing closer. Jean dropped the hand and shut his mouth, mind reeling. He really, sincerely ought to have paid more attention in class. Annie would have wrecked this kid at the snap of a finger, and here Jean was staring him down as he pressed a knife to one of his best friend’s throats, completely useless. 

“Don’t what?” Eren snarled back. “They’ve started you early this year, haven’t they? You police assholes think you can take what you want. You think you can abuse us and treat us like trash. You think you can come trap me in here together – how long has it been since you’ve graduated? And you’ve already started acting like monsters…”

“Wait!” Armin wailed. His hands were scrabbling, pawing at Eren’s arms where he held him inert. “We’re not trapping—“

“Shut up!”

“We’re not!” Jean joined in. Each word was louder and more vigorous than the last, feeble substitutes for the punches he couldn’t throw. “Put him down! Put him down, or I swear I’ll—“

“Go ahead and arrest me! Beat me! See how proud of you your superiors are when all the whores in Stohess start turning them away! You try it.” Eren jerked Armin again to cease his wriggling, spitting mad. “We won’t lay down quietly for you anymore. Either you leave and you take your peeping friend with you, and you don’t ever come back, or you _don’t_ leave this room at all.”

“Your name is Eren Yeager!” Armin shouted. His fingers fluttered and scraped over Eren’s arm as if strumming guitar strings to snapping. Eren halted. He was staring at the crown of blond hair under his chin as if Armin had reached up and slapped him quiet. “Your mother was Carla and your father was Grisha, and you lived in Shingansina until you were nine years old!”

Every ounce of color fell from Eren’s face until the only living part of him was those massive green eyes. They were even wider now, fixed wholly on Armin as the boy panted against his knife, and his ashen lips were splitting to reveal white teeth and the pink of his tongue.

“You had a friend and you read books together and you promised each other that you would one day see the world outside the walls! You’d travel – you would find the frozen earth and the liquid fire that comes from mountains, and the ocean! You promised – you’re – you’re Eren Yeager and you promised me. It’s me, Eren! You can’t have forgotten – please! Let me go!”

There was a broad silence stifling the room. Jean sweated more. If he braced himself on the bed, maybe he could put his weight on his arms and kick Eren in the face. He still hadn’t dropped Armin, seemingly frozen in time. A thick tear rolled down Armin’s cheek, squeezed out of eyes clenched shut as he gasped and moaned plaintively to his captor. “Please, Eren. It’s me. It’s Armin.”

Armin hit the floor with a thud. Eren nearly tripped trying to work his leg back over him and stumbled into his own nightstand, rocking the lamp until he had the mind to catch it. The knife had clattered down somewhere too, forgotten. Armin reared up to his knees and pulled the mussed hair from his face, sorting himself back to normal and watching Eren with unbridled earnesty.

Eren himself was white as ivory, shaking his head. “Armin is dead,” he whispered. “The Titans – Shingansina was the first to go –“

“Look at me, Eren,” Armin begged. Jean’s heart clenched and he found himself drawn back further onto the bed, unnerved by the way his friend’s eyes shone and how Eren had transformed from psychotic animal to cowering waif in the span of seconds. “I haven’t even changed my hair. Is it really that hard to see?”

Eren drew closer to the wall, mouth open in shock and shaking his head still. “This is a trick.”

“Don’t be stupid.” Armin’s lips worked, pulled into nothingness between his teeth before drawing back into the smallest, most hesitant smile Jean had ever seen. “Eren? You see now? You remember how we used to talk when we were young, about leaving the walls?” He spread his arms open, palms out, like a messianic deity. “How can it be a trick?”

The boy shook his head more. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from Armin. But he was gulping, and suddenly fixated on pulling the wide collar of his shirt closer to his neck. Just as Jean noted that there was a suspect purple bruise on the side, not far below his ear, Eren covered it with his hand and wrapped his other arm low around his middle, blocking the split between his shirt and trousers. 

He couldn’t seem to speak.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I debated holding off on this interlude until later, or putting it as a separate fic that would link back to this in a series, or just omitting it entirely and carrying on as I have been with the present conflict. But I think it was important enough to establish a bit more about Eren and Levi's relationship before we get much further, especially since he's going to be a bigger influence in future chapters on Eren and Armin both.
> 
> Hope y'all like it, and please forgive me for stretching out the cliffhanger another chapter more. You'll get the full reunion next chapter, I promise. :)

*~*Eight Months Prior*~*

Politics.

Levi could hang merchants and nobles and the whole damn monarchy for all the good they ever did their subjects. The worst part of being roped into the Corps so many years ago was that the higher you rose in ranks, the more you saw of them. You had to entreat them and play along with the niceties, and Levi loathed each step he took as he trailed after Erwin and miserably endured inane chitchat and snide jokes about the Corps’ ineffectual efforts against the Titans and, of course, his height.

Even more dismaying were the occasions when these meetings dragged into faux social outings, and he and Erwin and Mike were cordially invited out for drinks and stuck splitting hairs on business matters and pretending to enjoy the company of their hosts. Levi was terrible at it.

But he was especially morose when he saw exactly where they planned to take them for a round. 

He had been avoiding the place for a reason, and bluntly stated that once he had a rat crawl over his boot while drinking here. One official had called him a liar (on the mark for the first time that night) and patted his back with a laugh, insisting they were not there to partake in the whores, just the fine mead. It was a specialty. Erwin and Mike both had cast suspicious stares his way, and Levi knew that they were thinking something dangerously close to the truth.

So naturally, even though a half hour had passed and he’d been hoping that it meant the boy was either preoccupied or off for the night, he felt the sensation of eyes boring into the back of his head as he made to drain his pint. He didn’t want to turn. Everyone at the table had a finely attuned sense for scandal and subterfuge.

And so even more naturally, Erwin was already whispering to him. “You have an admirer.”

Levi huffed. He still did not turn back. “You sure they’re not staring at your shitty haircut?”

“Positive.” Levi continued to ignore the matter. The slime across from him were chortling loudly over some joke he had missed, and he watched their lips to catch what they were saying. Even if they were on the svelte second floor rather than the circus of the first, it was rather loud tonight, and overly crowded. It must be the annual Rich Assholes Get Drunk day. He chanced a sideways glance to Erwin and found that damnably tiny smile on his face. To those who didn’t know him it was nothing more than polite, as if he might be entertaining elderly company or about to compliment a freshly brewed cup of tea. Levi knew better: the more restrained and gracious he looked, the more smug Erwin was. “I think I found the rat that crawled over your boot.”

Mike had turned to listen. Levi scowled. “If you’re that determined to make a fool of me, say it louder. Our hosts didn’t hear you.”

“That’s not my intention at all. I merely wanted to confirm a hunch.”

“Then do it in your head, where the rest of your filthy thoughts belong.” Mike was looking over now, brows raising slow and sternly, and Levi couldn’t help sighing at how juvenile this had become. “If the both of you are done making it incredibly obvious—“

There was a banging on the table, their mugs migrating from the echoed shakes as the tallest of their hosts rapped the wood in front of them. “Secrets secrets secrets!” he said, grin broad and red nosed from the ale. “What is with all these secrets and whispers over here? Let’s have some fun, shall we? Let’s order a deck and another round.”

“Playing to gamble?” another asked. He was answered in the affirmative and chuckling as he took in the last swig of his drink, his companion already flagging down a woman at the bar. “Should we get some company then? I always play better when I’ve got a good woman to give me luck.”

“We’ll take requests. Any preferences?”

“None for me,” Erwin replied. “I play better with a focused mind.”

“Determined to turn out our pockets, I see. No matter. Girald? You?”

“No boys. Get some pretty girls over here. Blond for me.”

“Don’t be rude. You can’t put a damper on anyone else’s fun. What if our friends have adventurous tastes?”

“I am not sharing a table with sodomites. You know that’s how they do it with boys?”

The first man was laughing. “They sodomize the women here too, Girald.”

“It’s the principle of the matter. The boys are not clean. And it’s unnatural, they ought to outlaw it.”

“Even in a place like this? Lord, that’s the point of a damn brothel. Let a man indulge in peace.”

There would be sordid musings about him the moment he left. Levi knew it. Particularly at this point of the conversation. But he did not want to play cards, he didn’t want to listen to Girald being a loud-mouthed boor, and he especially wanted out from the bar before the boy could carve him open with his eyes alone. Or worse, approach their table. Levi stood, announcing, “I’ll sit this one out. I need some fresh air.”

“Oh? Don’t be scared, Levi, we won’t scrape every coin out of your hands.”

“I doubt you could if you tried. Consider this a mercy.”

Erwin, unreadable as ever, seemed to at least have some measure of sympathy in him. “It’s the truth. You know about the kind of gambling that goes on in the Underground City. Let’s all be grateful that Levi will let us play an evenly matched game.”

“I’d like to test that claim,” Girald said.

“Later, then.” Levi moved out of the bench and did not look back as he said, “I’ll be happy to drain you dry another day.”

It was a lie. Levi wasn’t an exceptional gambler. Competent was a more fitting term; card games had never been his choice in hobbies. But at least Erwin had the sense to carry out the ruse, and he could tread the stairs down and out into the open street, harrumphing to himself and hoping that he would never have to keep his word to challenge Girald in the future. He’d need luck for that, and he was sorely lacking in it as of late.

With the dark hour already cast down there were a few revelers, tripping out of the bar itself or on their way home, some standing in gaggles outside and puffing smoke into lazy swirls over their heads. Levi checked his pockets and found his cigarette tin lamentably empty. It wasn’t a compulsive habit, just one that soothed him every once in a while, and he could do with a little soothing after how the night had unraveled. He handled expeditions better than he did these public excursions, it seemed. At least those were battles he was equipped to fight in.

“Captain?”

Oh, Lord. Levi clipped the silver case shut and slipped it back in his pocket, starting into a walk. He could take a swing around the block, Erwin would understand. Pretending not to have heard, Levi strutted out to the street and tried not to hurry. It had to look unaffected or it would be all too obvious that he was avoiding the boy. 

That sound just now was the patter of soft shoes tripping after him, even after he had made it nearly halfway down the block. How irritating. Now Levi had no choice but to turn and face him before it devolved into a scene.

Last he recalled, the boy was more plump cheeked and doe eyed than he looked now. Or perhaps that was how he’d chosen to remember him, considering how he’d felt the morning after and the weeks subsequent. Though he was leaner in the cheeks and broader across the shoulders than he wanted to admit, Eren was still very much a child, and Levi took cutting comfort in that as he drew up to his tallest and thrust his shoulder out of reach before the boy could grab it.

Eren was confused. Offended, if the petulant crinkle in his brow said anything about it. He withdrew his reaching hand, fingers curling tight. “Are you really doing this?”

“Doing what?”

“Running away from me. I haven’t even said anything yet.”

“I walked slowly,” Levi countered flatly. 

“Your friends are still upstairs, and you’re still running away from me?” 

Levi remained impassive. He had hoped to avoid trying to articulate why he’d taken pains to avoid him and the bar as a whole, and Stohess itself when he was able, and he would do his best to keep it all hushed now. Eren struck at different parts of him than panicked soldiers or grieving families, but it was all the same principle. Remain calm and press your point. “Is this some trick they teach you? Do you chase all your customers into the street like runaway dogs?” 

Eren recoiled from that as if it were an open strike to the face. “What? No – I’m not chasing, not like – that’s what you think?”

The boy boggled at him for a moment, mouth just slightly ajar, before seeming to make up his mind. His jaw clenched tight and his eyes were hard, even if they started to pick up new light along the rims. The start of tears. 

Oh for god’s sake.

Eren nodded stiffly and spoke with no trace of emotion, careful and withdrawn. “Sorry to bother you. Captain, sir. Have a good night.”

He spun on his heel and started to stalk back to the tavern.

“What is that supposed to be?” Levi drawled. Eren did turn back, but it wasn’t the same flirtatious ploy he’d used last time. He was scowling, hands gripped into fists. “If you have something to say to me then get out with it. If you’re mad about losing business—“

“Business?” Eren parroted hotly. “You think I’d run after you for that? There’s plenty of people upstairs, I don’t need _your_ money.”

“Then get back up there. What the point of standing out here in the dark?”

“I guess there isn’t one, since you’re obviously just the same as every other dumbass with a badge,” Eren said.

Levi wasn’t sure what to do with this. His head was turned to the side, brow furrowed, incredulous and affronted and guilty for too many reasons to count. “What did you expect of me?” 

Eren was silent. Levi narrowed his eyes and reached forward to drag him out of the street and onto the safety of the footpath. Eren twisted loose of him the moment he was done. No carriages were coming but it was at least a good pretense to get him back where he could squeeze an answer from him. “Oi. I asked you a question.”

“I didn’t expect…” Whatever the thought was, Eren was loathe to follow it. His mouth twisted into an ugly bend and he staunchly kept his eyes to the ornate fence at their side. 

“Well?”

Eren glowered. “I had just _thought_ , considering where you came from, that you might be different.”

Dead air drifted between them. It was getting darker, the stars faint and the moon gone, and the only lights they had to go by now were where the windows were not shuddered and still lit. Largely they belonged to the brothel across the street, and so the two of them were painted in navies and grays. It made the scene more fitting, somehow. Levi would hate to be discussing this under the brightness of day, or even the gaiety of the lamplights from the brothel windows. 

Eren’s head was shaking, his teeth were gritted. Speaking this aloud was humiliating in some sense, and Levi realized with a sinking dread that he knew exactly what Eren was going to say before it came out of the boy himself. “I’ve heard a lot about you,” Eren said reluctantly, crossing his arms for one last defiance. “You’re from the Underground City, right? You and your friends were criminals. But just to survive – not like the ones up here, you weren’t trying to take advantage of anyone. And then you joined the Survey Corps. And you became the best.

“For someone like that, to come from nothing and then dedicate their whole life to try and save humanity…it made me feel like it could have been anyone. You were one of us, once, and then you were able to change yourself into something great. That kind of selflessness…” His voice was drifting, softer by the second as he pried out these lofty thoughts and laid them out on a guillotine block. Eren knew it, too. Though standing, with his arms crossed and his head bowed, shoulders hunched and eyes cast far, far down, he was as close as he could come to hiding from Levi while still engaging in conversation. “You got out of the gutter we were born in and worked hard for a real purpose, instead of trying to hide closer inside the walls.”

Little children looked at Levi with that same yearning, before they grew up and knew different, saw how many times the Survey Corps trailed back inside the walls with half the men they left with. Some of the clueless sort in Sina, too, where they were so far removed from the tragedy that they could only see the glory in his work and toasted him for it. New recruits beamed at him, trembled in reverence. Older members at times, too. Awestruck women. Each one cut at Levi as sharply as a fresh blade. Each one was damned. Yet he didn’t think he’d ever seen anything so sad as this.

“Who is this man you’re talking about?” Levi said quietly. Eren unfurled, not so much shocked as puzzled. He had been expecting rejection of some kind, that had been clear, but perhaps not in the same words Levi was giving him now. “You’ve imagined a whole person from rumors alone.”

Eren’s gaze flicked back and forth between Levi’s eyes, watching for signs of any sort and tensing as if expecting a blow. “But it’s the truth, isn’t it?”

“In parts,” Levi corrected. His head was lowered now, even if Eren stood above him by the width of a palm, worsening his natural scowl to a cutting portrait of severity. “I didn’t volunteer for anything. They hunted me down and beat me like a dog. I was given a choice between joining the Corps, or being handed over to the police. I chose the option that let me walk in the daylight. I’m not so noble as you’ve imagined me to be.”

“You still chose to fight the Titans, though. Everyone else is too scared. And you worked so hard to get to be the best—“

Levi snatched him by the collar and gave him a shake. “You’re still trying to paint me as some sort of saint. Stop daydreaming and look at the man in front of you now.” 

“I am!” Eren snapped. 

“Then don’t blather on like this. No one deserves their reputation, for better or for worse. What kind of hero am I if I bought your time in the first place?”

It had been exactly the wrong thing to say. Levi should have seen it, should have anticipated it, for now Eren was lighting up like the wick of a kerosene lamp. He stood straight again, cat-like eyes wide and curious. Levi sneered. He let go of his collar and made to leave, tried to think of some cold remark he could toss behind to burn at the boy for the rest of the night and repel him permanently.

Eren beat him out. “I think –“ he stopped, swallowing not with nerves but with a prepatory calm. 

The rest would flay him alive. Levi still paused to hear it. That was his second mistake.

“I think you’re not the man you’re telling me you are, either.”

If he could, he would flat out tell him that he joined the Corps to kill Erwin. For revenge, for damage to his pride. Instead Levi had to settle for a thin glare and a knifelike, “Is that so? Tell me then. What kind of man am I?”

Eren could not be cowed now. It would be near impossible; he was far more clever than Levi had given him credit for. Brash, too. “I think you’re a man who has no choices. Not because you aren’t given them, but because you give yourself none. I think you’ve already lived life for your own sake, and something happened maybe and you had to change your mind. And now if you try to live for yourself, it’s like a sin to you. Because you think it should always be about making life better for someone else.

“And maybe the last time we met something was wrong. You let yourself be selfish and now you think you have to pay for it. You think it came at my expense.” He had the temerity to smile. “But lots of people do it here. There’s a lot of pigs and assholes but there are some people that come here because they’ve lost something, or they can’t have what they need.”

Levi wanted to recoil. To hit him. Shake him out of continuing. Anything to stop it, but the boy had him pinned in place with such simple words.

Eren took a deep breath, looking over at the brothel with a sense of wistfulness. Maybe something closer to pity, with the way his eyes narrowed and his speech turned somber. “There’s a saying around here that goes something like, you see a person’s true face in two places: in the battlefield, and in bed. Sometimes I think it’s true. I think we see sides of people they aren’t allowed to show anywhere else. It can be ugly. The same person can even show you a different side each time you’re with them. But it’s so small in there when you’re with someone, that sometimes they just let go. A lot of people cry. And some talk, and they talk and talk and can’t stop and I think that’s because they don’t get a chance to talk anywhere else. There’s a man that pays me to just lay next to him and hold his hand while he sleeps, for the whole hour. Just because his wife is gone and he can’t stand sleeping alone.

“And last time, I don’t think you were really yourself. I could smell the drink on you. And you haven’t sworn at me yet tonight or tried to blow smoke at my face or anything. But that night you did this…near the end, when you’d finished, you stopped to help me finish too.”

Through the livid freeze on his every fiber, Levi found himself politely baffled. He blinked. “That could not have been the first time someone’s yanked your dick.”

Eren made a strangled noise. “Not that! It was the look on your face! There was something there, something like…like you would hate yourself if you didn’t come down to help me finish. Afterwards you were still rude but you were really listening to me when I asked about the world outside the walls, and you meant it at the time about coming back. Before we started, too, you were trying to warn me off, saying I was too young. You wanted me but you stuck to it anyway. Even now, you could have just slapped me away or called me a stupid whore or something, but you made me stay and you tried to tell me why I’m better off not speaking to you. Why would you waste your time like that if you didn’t feel like you owed it to me?”

Now Eren was taking careful stock of the patch at his breast pocket. The Wings of Freedom. He looked at it as if he was seeing some dank, long forgotten treasure, rusted and glorious still. “We get a lot from the Corps, you know. Those that can come into Sina at least. They always want to forget for a night. And they’re a lot nicer about business than the police.”

The hustle of the bar had dampened some. The late hour was showing, and the street grew quieter, quieter, losing the danger of a public sprawl and carrying more the intimacy of a locked pantry or a slender side alley in the underground. Equally as dangerous, and it felt so. Levi was of half a mind to throttle the boy or bolt like a spooked beast. 

Levi was still neglecting to reply. He could scarcely find the breath for it, let alone the arguments he needed. Eren fidgeted with the hem of his sleeve, the tugs wrinkling from the bottom up to the bicep and the yellow stripe sewn there. “Even if I’m not completely right, what I’m trying to say is that it’s not bad to want something you need.”

Except that sometimes it was. Levi had to ignore his pounding heart, the weight on his guts that threatened to crush them against the stones at his feet, in order to answer. 

He did so by not answering at all. “How did you come here?”

Eren halted, drawing his brows together, but shrugged. “It’s not important.”

“How old are you really?”

“Don’t pretend you’re some kind of monster. This is my job.”

“And is it a job you chose, or did you land yourself in the same bind I did?” Levi had his bite back, tongue wicked hot as it lashed out at last. Eren tumbled head first out of serenity, drawing back in shock and pressing his mouth tightly shut. “A word of advice, Eren. Don’t ever romanticize a man who’s willing to buy your time. There’s nothing in them but shit and piss.”

Then Levi left. All he had to do was turn, walk twenty paces to the end of the block, and disappear down the next street. It was that simple after all the fuss he’d made. Eren didn’t follow, and made no calls to his retreating back.

*~*

Erwin admonished him for abandoning the party later, but wearily conceded that the night ended not too long after. A few lazy hands of cards had been played and then two of the three officials had dragged women upstairs, and he, Mike, and the remaining man had called it a night.

“Your admirer followed you out,” Erwin noted blithely, rolling up his cuffs and lighting a lamp at his desk, prepping for the stacks of forms towering at the opposite edge. “I assume that’s why you didn’t come back?”

“I didn’t fuck him, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Why not?”

“He’s a damn child and a brat, that’s why,” Levi spat, appalled. 

“Did that stop you the last time?”

If he had gloves available, he would have slipped them on and wordlessly strangled Erwin on the spot. His response was low and frigid cold. “I don’t see why you’re so fixated on this. There’s plenty of deviants in this place worse than me.”

“Don’t let Hanji hear you say that,” Erwin was wearing that putrid smile again, the chair creaking as he settled into it like a king to his throne. Levi should have clocked him for the Hanji comment too. She was a lunatic but not in the perverted sense, and in spite of himself he didn’t like to hear other people talking behind her back about it. “And I wouldn’t call you a deviant. He’s young, but they don’t keep boys much past twenty at a place like that. I can’t honestly blame you.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

The smile had vanished. Erwin’s hands were folded in front of his chin and he was scrutinizing Levi as if his thoughts were scrawled out across his forehead. “I might.”

Levi narrowed his eyes. “Bullshit.”

“Not in the same sense as you,” Erwin carried on. “If I hadn’t chosen the Corps I would have been married, and happily so. But I’m not. Do you think I haven’t made my own trips down there? Or to other bars, to other whorehouses, just for an hour of peace?”

“I think there’s a lot you do that I don’t care to know about.”

“Levi. We don’t live long. Not all of us want to risk making commitments. Think of the damage done when we leave families behind.” His attention was divided now as he slid off the first form from the stack and wet his pen anew. “If you can’t find someone to comfort you in the ranks – and I understand that it’s harder when not many men share your taste, or hide it if they do – then take your wages to the whores and be kind to them when you’re there. Our lives are torture enough without dragging yourself through celibacy.”

“You know how they all end up there, don’t you?” Levi pressed. “None of them stay by choice.”

Erwin flicked his gaze Levi’s way only briefly, inking signatures and figures without pause. “They’re fed and cared for in the brothels. If not for that, they’d be out on the streets. If you want to flagellate yourself for a real crime, go buy yourself a fuck for half a thaler. Don’t you remember those starving wretches underground?” Erwin wasn’t a man who sighed. Not often. Instead he would give a huff of breath through his nose, scarcely able to be heard but irksome once you knew of it, and forever after inescapable. “Leave, then, if you’re that determined to loathe yourself. From the look of it, the boy doesn’t hold a single grudge against you.”

Both conversations haunted him after. He slept uneasily, and woke in a foul mood. From start to finish they would play in his head, wafting into his ears during the mundanity of meals, or jarring him out of other more important matters.

Levi was still convinced he was in the right about it. Eren was abysmally young and regardless of the details, no whore had a sappy fairy tale behind how they were dragged into the business. That night Levi had hoped, initially, that he could sit through a few drinks and find company amongst the clientele. Or at the very least with someone older. In spite of what Erwin said it wasn’t impossible to find adult men willing to donate an hour of their day for money. Levi even knew of a few personally in the Underground City, but he could not bear to bring himself down there and twist them around his finger with the promise of coins. Not ever. He knew too intimately what a fuck for half a thaler looked like, having witnessed such dealings more than he’d ever liked to admit.

Once the time wore on he had gotten some liquor in him and he was agitated, and he had seen someone across the room that had damn near the same gait and hair as Farlan Church, and he had not told anyone where he was and he began to convince himself that it was less from self-preservation and more that not a soul he knew would have joined him for a fucking pint. He’d grown outraged at several things at once, like the winged patch at his sleeve and breast, his aches and scars, his stunted form, the inane chatter and laughter around him, the gaudy dresses the women wore that strangled even the smallest bust upwards and out of their necklines like buns on a platter. Everyone looked pathetic and Levi was had sat there smoking and drinking and feeling very much like he would have been better off in a prison cell after all. Life and all its colors had swirled down to wan trickles and even three towering walls away, it seemed as if he was staring down a dank, yawning maw; the end so close he could reach out and touch it, run his hand over the teeth that matched his hand span from thumb to the outmost edge of his little finger, press his foot into the spongy tongue that laid flat and broad as a mattress.

And then there had been a boy slipping into the chair opposite his without so much as an invitation or a hello. Pretty and all too eager to give him something else to think about.

So, in essence, he was the exact sort of man Eren had said he was. Fucking to forget. Which was galling in the worst ways: though Levi knew it was only from a broad (but very specific) wealth of experience that Eren was able to fit him so squarely into a peg, it still burned to get dressed down by some starry-eyed little shit. And that was without addressing how weak he was, that he was willing to use what was essentially a slave to slake his yearnings, just to ignore that he was a miserable old sack of meat and bones, destined to die in pain, for one night.

It wasn’t worth…

But in his own way, Eren had used him too. That wasn’t even the phrase for it – Levi couldn’t think of a suitable term and sneered to himself as he bypassed the matter. All he wanted was to hear about the outside world. He didn’t even have to hear about it from Levi. There were other members of the Corps running about the city, correspondents and special ops for reports and higher ranking members. And he had gone about it so sloppily, not making one mention of it until well after Levi had taken the bait and gotten what he wanted. He should have dangled it over his head before they got started, as a guarantee. That would have been the smarter way to bargain.

That stupid grin was so wide, though. Perfectly pure. When he had said goodbye there were notes of something sad at play. And there was the trepidation with which he approached his request, too. Nothing about it felt like a bargain, even if Eren’s first move was to offer a price cut on future visits if he just came back. Just for stories. Relayed sights and sounds. It was such a stupidly simple request, and to think the kid would go through all that trouble for it. To chase him out last night, even, was that at all necessary? Anyone could tell the little brat about the world. He could take his pick of the rest of the Corps, surely, or try to get his hands on some illegal literature. It wasn’t that hard.

Levi was burning again. Neither liquor nor fury were on hand to take the blame now. He spent some time during a lull in appointments with his forehead pressed to the wall in a lavatory, eyes shut and teeth bared, arm braced against the wall above him and his fingers rapping out a foreboding beat.

He sought out Hanji later that afternoon and asked for the other half of the arrowhead she’d dug from the ground on a previous expedition. It was made from a stone no one could place, inky black and the shine on it was like a direct gleam of the sun on glass. It was originally intact, albeit banged up, but Hanji had shrieked in anguish after unwrapping her end of the supply carts and discovered that it had succumbed to the curving fissure at the base. She relented without too much protest, keeping the smaller piece out of a respect for their deep and timeless friendship (her words, never Levi’s), and it weighed heavily in his breast pocket as he wore it around from errand after meeting after meal.

When the sun left the sky and he was dismissed for the night, he slipped on his cloak over casual attire, trod down a now familiar path, and pushed open the burly door to the brothel. He found Eren in the muck of the first floor, perched at the edge of a table by himself and looking rather astonished to see him.

“I wanted to forget,” Levi said, all greetings bypassed and further befuddling the boy in front of him. “The last time I came here. It was a day from before the Corps. An anniversary of sorts. It’s always made me want a stiff drink.”

Eren caged him in with his consideration, wide eyed as he took in the implications. He might not know them by name but he must have heard something of Isabel and Farlan, if he’d known that Levi wasn’t alone when he was drafted into the Corps. It wouldn’t take too much effort to slot together the pieces in that puzzle. 

He looked his proper age now, fidgeting even as he indulged in the pleasure of being right. “I thought it was something like that,” he said, hunched and small. “You don’t have to explain anything, Captain. I didn’t mean to pry. I’m sorry about what I said last night. And for following you out. Really. I went too far—”

“Be quiet.” Levi put an end to the stammering when he brusquely withdrew the arrowhead and pressed it into Eren’s hands. He was grateful that Hanji gave him the larger piece, because on this one it was obvious that it had been carved and notched by human efforts rather than being broken out of the earth somewhere. Eren turned it over, jaw dropped in bare awe, running his finger over the chips in the flat face and the decorative grooves along its edge.

“Its old. Don’t bother asking what kind of rock it is. Nobody knows.”

The smile Eren gave him was the kind that made it easy to ignore the licking flames of Hell as you sunk into its darkest pits. Levi’s chest could not have been tighter, he could not have made a stupider decision if he chose to fly straight into the mouth of a Titan, and he knew without a shred of doubt that there would be whispers from Stohess to Rose and every hamlet in between that Humanity’s Strongest had a fondness for boys. But Eren was all teeth and roses blooming in his cheeks, and the churn in Levi’s gut wasn’t born of fear anymore.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...........................................
> 
> Next time it won't take me a month and a half to update. (.__.)

In retrospect, he ought to have planned this all a bit better.

Armin had expected some sort of shock, it was only natural. It didn’t mean he was sure of how to counter it. Eren was flattening himself against the wall and covering his neck and middle as if they had caught him in some state of undress.

Jean was no help, flabbergasted and mouth closed shut as he sat unmoving on the bed. His cheek was still bright red from the hit – Armin should have come out sooner, he had just been distracted. Terrified, more like, both by his own expectations and the risk of staying in the closet and popping out unexpectedly like a bat out of a chimney. He had thought Jean would try to bring up the subject but he’d looked twice as mortified as Armin, and had done nothing but shoot pointed stares to the crack in the wardrobe doors.

Plus, and he’d have to beg some deity for forgiveness for this later, he had been a little preoccupied with how Eren had caged him in with his legs and held Jean’s head as if he might bend down and kiss him. The memory of him caught between the two men hadn’t quite been wiped from Armin’s mind yet and it had him muddled and enraptured to see Jean in the same predicament, bullied down with Eren’s slender hands at his cheeks. 

“Eren?” Armin tried feebly. It stung to see him backed away so far, as if Armin was some starving beast that had cornered him. Eren raised his chin, wet his lips, opening to prepare something to say.

The abrupt thudding down the hall outside made them all jump in their skin and turn to the door, perplexed. Was that someone running? 

“Dammit!” Eren keened. 

Before Armin could ask where the fire was, he was being shoved into the corner behind the door with neither care nor warning. Armin yelped, was shushed by a wild eyed Eren, and the door was blown open. If Eren hadn’t caught the handle in time Armin’s nose would be shattered.

“Where is he?” growled a voice – Armin couldn’t see, and didn’t dare try to take a peek. He immediately assumed the identity of the wall he was pressed against and ceased to make sound. With half the room barred from view by the door he was privy only to Jean going ashen on the bed, backpedalling on his hands to take sanctuary among the throw pillows, and the tight grip of Eren’s hand on the knob. 

“Get out, Adalbert!” Eren hissed. “It was a false alarm! Just go!”

“What do you fucking mean? Rita said she brought—“

“Well he must have got scared and left or something!” Eren threw his free arm back to Jean in a furious gesture, who shrunk his head into his collar and gaped in horror. “You are scaring my guest! Put the knife away and go back downstairs!”

“Then why were you all up in here yelling and making a racket like you was scrapping with some sunuvabitch?”

“It was just pretend! Like usual!”

Jean squeaked. Then he vanished into the pile of pillows. Though muffled, his scream of searing humiliation was not lost on a single soul in the room. Eren pointed to him again. “Now look what you did!”

The man harrumphed, clearly unimpressed. “Didn’t sound so pretend to me—“

“Probably because I’m good at my _job_.” The door was shrinking away, a two handed effort on Eren’s part to shove out the man. He was mulishly sticking his foot in the bottom to thwart him. “Now go downstairs and do yours!”

“Now hold on just a minute, Eren—“

“Get out of here, old man!”

And the struggle was over. The door clamped shut, Eren turned the lock. He pressed his forehead to the wood and remained there to breathe thinly through his nose. Armin didn’t move a muscle.

Jean, however, had emerged from his refuge of pillows to approach them on shaky legs. He clapped a hand on Eren’s shoulder. “Oi.” When Eren glowered at him through the curtain of his hair Jean bared his teeth in a snarl. “Was it necessary to make me look like a complete _pervert_ just now?”

“Are you really worried about that right now? No one will care.”

“You could have chased him off without telling him that I asked you to—“ Jean bloomed red and choked before he could complete the thought “—it was completely unnecessary and now everyone here will think—“

“Well what was I supposed to do?” Eren barked. He slipped away from the door and swung his hands towards it in a clear offer. “Go then! Catch up with him, tell him he was right! See what happens!” 

“You guys!” Armin thrust himself between them and repelled them by their chests. “This isn’t – please, not now, if they hear us fighting again someone might come!”

Jean obeyed the silent order, teeth clicking as he dropped his infuriated gape. On the other side of him Eren skittered back, alarmed. He had slipped into owlish staring again, Armin’s touch rattling him clean out of his rage.

“I....” He pressed his hand to his mouth again and switched to staring at the wall above his bed. Deep lines threaded the space between his brows, and Armin was all the more unsure of how to proceed from here. “Sorry. Shit, this is such a mess…” Eren shook his head and raked his hair with skittish fingers. The two of them might have been ghosts for all the effort he put into ignoring them. 

Eren stalked towards the nightstand. He set the lamp, knocked askew in the commotion, back in the centre, and started to straighten the pillows. 

He was smoothing out the sheets Jean had mussed. Armin glanced at his friend, who looked much less indignant and a touch more concerned now that all claws were retracted. Jean nudged him with his elbow, and Armin stumbled closer to the bed. “Eren?”

Eren wouldn’t face him. “You didn’t see – in the wardrobe, you didn’t see what was in there, did you?”

Armin boggled at him. What sort of a question was that?

Rather than try to answer (and privately wondering what he had missed), he took a chance and touched his arm. He let it rest gently there rather than gripping, so Eren could slip away if it suited him – and he did flinch – but the fussing stopped. Eren’s mouth twisted. Armin’s insides were awash with ice. “Eren?”

“How…” He lost the courage for a moment. Eren cocked his head his way and Armin’s heart raced, facing him head on. So close. He looked so much like the child he remembered and yet so eerily like his mother, fine bones for his cheeks and the sleekly tapering jaw. “How?” Eren finally ventured.

“Um.” A ‘how’ could apply to any number of things. Armin looked back to Jean, who could only shrug and blink. He looked a touch queasy over by the door, and seemed unwilling to come any closer to the pending explosion in front of him. Armin swallowed to combat the sudden dryness of his throat. “I…well I got on the boat in Shingansina. I was taken into Wall Rose with the other refugees.”

“This whole time?” Armin nodded. Eren huffed and heaved and had to wipe at his eyes rapid fire, as if neither boy would spot any evidence of tears if he moved quickly enough. “Did…What about…”

“Your mom is alive,” Armin said in a rush.

That had done it. The quaking trepidation broke when Eren gawked, toggling between searing broken smiles and open shock. In the next second he dropped to the bed and Armin followed to the floor, kneeled at his feet imploringly. Eren hunched over as he tried not to cry into his hands and trousers. Wetness tickled at Armin’s cheeks too, but his heart was blooming. Bursting. It hurt to smile so wide, but how could he not?

“My mom?” came the feeble question, and Armin grinned even bigger and reached for his hands, not relenting when Eren tried to jerk them away. 

“Yes! Look at me Eren.” He did, though it seemed to burn him to do so. Eren was biting his lip and tears were falling free and fast. “Your mom is alive. She’s been with me this whole time.”

“Dad?”

Armin pursed his lips and shook his head. “He disappeared. We don’t know what happened.”

His expression dampened. Eren sniffed, head shaking. His hands trembled in Armin’s grip. “That’s fine. That’s what I thought, with the Titans everywhere. I’d thought _everyone_ …I can’t believe…I’m sorry, I’m just so…” The jittering of his sobs turned to laughter. Eren had broken loose in a glorious grin from ear to ear and he squeezed Armin’s hands back so tightly he might bruise the fingers. “You’re alive.”

“You’re alive!” Armin exclaimed. “Eren, you have no idea—“

It was impossible to continue while he was simply looking him in the face. Their hands were entwined, warm. Armin shot upwards, still on his knees but raised high enough to trap Eren in the circle of his arms, and he laughed breathlessly as the boy paid him back in kind. Neither ropes nor chains could bind them together as tightly. Eren dragged him off the floor and over top of himself, wheezing as he was pinned entirely under Armin against the scarlet sheets. Both were cackling with no care for decency. Their foreheads knocked together and Armin’s thick hair was sticking to the wet trails on Eren’s cheeks but neither paid it any mind. Eren had his name as a looping mantra, a tireless track running under each gasp and laugh as if the sound of it was candy to roll around in his mouth and savor.

“You’re alive, you’re alive,” he chattered giddily, pushing over so that they could lie on their sides together rather than continue being squashed inelegantly as one. “I never thought I’d see you again! You – and you’re in the –“

Quite abruptly he pulled up and away, mortified. “You’re the one who was spying on me last night?” 

Oh dear. “Ah – it’s not what you think!” Armin bustled upright, waving his hands. “We were here – Jean, we were only here to celebrate my acceptance into the Military Police, right?”

Jean, who had wilted some and was now sitting bashful and red-faced on a trunk by the door, nodded stiffly. “Uh huh.”

“Because I had come in late, you see, and then I saw you from across the room and I couldn’t be sure, but then you were taken upstairs…” It was Armin’s turn to grow hot in the face. “My intentions were not to…that is…I only wanted to make sure I wasn’t imagining…”

Eren was biting his lip. “Did you see anything?”

Armin bowed his head. “No. I saw nothing.” A little white lie never hurt anyone. Hopefully that doorman wouldn’t have spilled any great details about it. 

Eren sighed, dragging his hand down his forehead. He startled, realizing that he was still a mess of tear streaks, and set to wiping them all away. Armin mirrored him with equal haste. “No, that’s fine. I’m glad. I really thought I was going to have to stab someone.”

Armin balked. “You would have really?”

“Well I’m not about to let some creep start stalking me.” A sentiment that gave no comfort to Armin, and Eren shrunk away and shrugged at his uneasiness. “It happens _sometimes_. But that doesn’t matter, you’re not a creep and you’re not stalking me.”

“I’m sorry, I suppose I should have been more forthright,” Armin muttered. 

“I’ll say,” Jean grumbled from across the room. Eren raised him a cool stare. Jean put his hands in the air in surrender. “You did slap me.”

Eren ignored him. Armin bit his lip and turned back for a brief, “Sorry, Jean.”

“So you’ve joined the Police?” Eren tugged him back. There was a trace of skepticism now, and Armin could see the stack of books in the corner. Though it was a meager collection, and some titles faded, he could tell they were the same heretical teachings that he himself delved into as a child fantasizing about the world outside. “I wouldn’t have guessed that.”

Armin almost blurted out an apology, an explanation. But that would mean detailing exactly what state Carla Yeager was in, and Armin was just selfish enough not to want to lose this bubble of happiness they’d made. Later, he decided. When the news would be less crushing, and they weren’t still reveling in the freshness of their reunion. “It’s a long story,” Armin said, waving it off. “I’ll tell you later. I want to know what happened to you.”

Not a much better topic than a crippled and mad mother. Not with how Eren immediately winced and thrust his gaze to the floor, toes curling. Armin expected as much, but he had to know. And there was a difference between relaying past hurts and crushing future hopes. “Uh. Well. I don’t know what you guys think happened. What did Dad tell you?”

“Grisha didn’t know either, but the girl –“

“They found her?” Eren perked up.

“Yes, she’s with me here too. They took her in.” He couldn’t suss out the true nature of Eren’s expression at that. All he could do was smile and hope that it was all right to continue. The trunk creaked and Jean’s shoes scuffed the floor. “Yes, but um, she said that you had come in and untied her and gave her your scarf, and you let her sneak out of the cabin. And that’s all anyone knows.”

Eren laughed. It was sharp and quite unlike the mirth he’d been rolling in before. “Yeah. That’s…I’m glad they found her. I always wondered…” He sighed deeply and scratched at his hair. “I was so stupid. I had a knife on me. And I had hoped I could sneak in while they were sleeping and cut their throats or something, but the door creaked and they all woke up. They beat me pretty badly when they found out that girl was gone. Sometimes I think it would have been better if I had waited for the police, but they would have been too late. I tried, but…I was just a kid and they were all…” He shrugged and pursed his lips.

“Anyway, after that they argued and one of them just wanted to kill me and be done with it, but the other two kept saying they wanted to get paid one way or another, so they wiped me clean and brought me into Sina to see what they could get for me.” Eren halted. He shot a sidelong glance to Armin.

“And then you came here?” Armin concluded helpfully. If he could keep it brief it might ease Eren’s embarrassment. 

“No. That was after.” There was a definite sense of shrinking about Eren now, though he did not move a muscle beyond the twist of his lips and the worried knot between his brows. His eyes flicked back and forth between Armin’s, a search for something unknown. “I got sold to a Duke. I spent three years on the other end of Sina between his summer house and his regular house and court and wherever else he went.”

Armin didn’t say a word. His brow was furrowed as the words swirled around his head, uncatchable. Then his gut dropped into pure ice, and he was left gaping once more. 

Jean, who had been quite complacent throughout, suddenly piped up, baffled. “What? Like as a stable boy?”

“Jean!” Armin hissed sharply. His friend startled. 

“What did I say?”

“It’s fine, Armin.”

Armin snatched his hands again, shaking them for punctuation.“No, it’s – that’s appalling –“

“It’s not important anymore,” Eren grumbled, pulling his hands back but Armin wouldn’t let him go. He relented with a soft huff. “He sent me here when I was twelve and I haven’t seen the asshole since.”

“You’ve been working here since you were _twelve?_ ” Jean squawked.

Eren’s lip curled. “Are you trying to make something of it?”

“But that’s – isn’t twelve too young?”

“Nine wasn’t,” Eren retorted.

“But – wait, nine?” The whites of Jean’s eyes grew morbidly larger, crowding out the already punitive iris and pupil as the rest of his face went pink in haphazard blotches. “But you said you were with the…You weren’t a prostitute until you were twelve, you just said so.”

“I was a fucking slave. Then I got too old. He bought a new younger kid and sold me off.”

Jean made a noise that promised no good health, and covered his mouth to stifle it. Eren’s fingers were curling tight around Armin’s. The knuckles had bled to white. Armin shook their entwined hands again and tittered nervously.

“No, you’re right, it’s gone. It’s not important anymore. Eren, the important thing is that you’re alive, and we’re here, and we can think of something together.”

“Think of something?” Eren parroted.

“Well, yes. You can’t stay here like this, can you?” Armin smiled wide and grabbed his shoulders. “We have quarters given to us for now, because we’re new, but with our salaries it shouldn’t be so long before we’re able to get some small place in town. We can stay together. Oh, and your mom!” Once she improved, that was. With Eren back and a proper doctor, Armin was confident she could have some sense returned to her.

The elation he expected failed to show. Instead Eren looked as if he had been called to court. “Uh…My mom…you haven’t told her…”

Perhaps he should be at least a bit ashamed – when Armin had visited her earlier he did come in with the intention of telling her about Eren. He hadn’t planned to omit that he had been found in a brothel, but now that Eren was speaking with him and turning away, hiding things in his closet and trying to cover love bites on his neck, Armin felt he should consider a little tact next time. 

Not that it would matter much, with Carla still caught in fits and fancies. Armin wasn’t sure how much she kept of what he and Mikasa said and how much she tossed out the window like bathwater. “No. I haven’t.”

Eren groaned in relief, covering his face. “Please don’t. You can say anything, but just don’t say – I couldn’t stand it if she knew.”

“She won’t,” Armin assured. “But Eren, like I said, you won’t have to be here anymore. I promise. We’ll get you a proper job.”

Eren wouldn’t uncover his face. Only silence bloomed between them, and after a tense pause Armin’s smile stayed less from pleasure and more from aching earnesty. “Eren?

Eren’s chest burgeoned with the bracing breath he took, withdrawing his hands with a pointed reluctance. He was utterly impassive otherwise. “We shouldn’t be having this conversation here.” Armin must have looked particularly crestfallen, because Eren immediately took his hands again. “I mean it. We’re going to get in trouble if you both stay up here too long. Come with me, I’ll take you guys out through the tunnels.”

Jean gathered his cap, and Eren pushed the wardrobe doors shut (Armin tried to peek, but he couldn’t see whatever it was that Eren had been embarrassed about) and retrieved the small lamp at his bedside before they crept back outside. Rustles and giggles and creaking springs hid their footfalls as Eren, true to his word, ushered them to the second staircase at their end of the hall, the entrance disguised as a perfectly seamless segment of wall. Rita had smuggled him in through this way. The steps were hewn from unpolished stone, and their shoes scuffed and scraped inelegantly against them. The tunnels beyond were much the same, and the anemic light from the flame put a quiet reverence in them all. No one said a word.

But Eren’s fingers tickled Armin’s knuckles. It was hardly premeditated – the notion spurned out of the tiny touch, the strong ache across his chest – and next Armin knew he was clasping their hands together. Just like how they used to run down the street in the old days, and with the same seamless fit between their palms. Their hands were still matched in size. Armin gulped, flushing hot at the cheeks, and shot Eren glances he couldn’t detect as he led their way through the dark and silent tunnel. 

The light hit the edges of Eren’s nose and cheeks like strokes from a paintbrush. It dusted his lashes with gold. 

It was Jean who first sought to ease the silence. Armin saw him twist around to check behind them before he muttered, much more lowly than was likely necessary, “Where are we going?” 

“The Wallist church. It’s not far to the headquarters from there, right?” Eren looked between them both. “That is where you’re staying.”

“Yes.” Armin worried his lip. “Tomorrow – I’ve not got a full day’s work, Eren. Maybe you could come—“

“Not there,” Eren said with a scowl. 

“ _Armin_ ,” Jean warned. 

“No, I agree, it wouldn’t be right to take you around where the police are. Could we meet somewhere, maybe? By the Brothaus? Noon?”

Eren slowed. “Oh, that bakery? Yeah. I think I could.” He pulled his hand free of Armin’s and it was hard not to reach out and steal it back, but Eren was reaching into his pocket instead. “Before I forget.”

He withdrew a small satchel. Jean’s purse. The other boy reclaimed it with a diminutive thanks, and shook out the contents in his hand to count. Eren held the lamp closer and suddenly squawked in outrage.

“Are you serious?!” he snapped, whipping one of the coins out of Jean’s palm. The shadow it cast was odd, four holes in the centre of the dark circle. 

A button.

“Jean, I thought you had enough for half!” Armin cried.

“Well I didn’t, all right?” Jean parried, grabbing for the button. Eren thrust his arm back and away, the button borne high. “Give it back! I have to sew it onto Bert’s coat before morning!”

“Bert’s coat?!” He tugged at his hair. “Why? Why take his?”

“He barely uses that old rag! No one would notice!”

Eren was not to be ignored. He swept Armin aside to crowd Jean, jabbing a vicious finger at the coins in his palm. “You were going to pay me in buttons?!” Eren snarled. “What if I had to hand this in, asshole?!”

“I didn’t think—“

“So you just _assumed_ I’d give it back?”

“Well, yeah, it wasn’t like we did anything.”

The lamp light was almost vanquished when Eren brandished it through the air, pointing back the way they came. “How am I supposed to account for all the time I wasted on you, then?” 

“Don’t yell at me, you just volunteered to give it back! Obviously you have some plan!”

Armin moaned balefully into his hands. “Jean, why didn’t you just say something? I could have lent you more.”

“Come on you guys! What’s done is done, isn’t it?”

“ _OI!_ ”

The holler was that of a woman’s. There was a furious clop of heels on stone. Eren blanched and turned around, holding the lamp aloft until their interloper burst out of the shadows, a sudden invasion of reds and periwinkle skirts, glinting gold at the hands.

Rita had found them.

She gave no preamble. She had a knife clutched under her gleaming rings and tapered nails, but did not use it: her eyes flicked from the dumbfounded Jean to Armin, who was stunned to stillness and gawking, then back to the bristling Eren in the middle. She seized him by the wrist and thrust the knife into her belt, then wrestled him for the lamp. 

“Give me that,” she snarled.

“Rita, don’t!” Eren protested, but it was no good. She twisted it out of his fingers without spilling a drop of oil or dousing the flame. She held it far out of his reach, then tugged him close by the ear.

“Hey!” Jean started forward, fist clenched. Armin tried to catch Eren by the sleeve and yank him to safety but she had wrangled him to her side. He hobbled along, hands on her wrist to stifle the pinch.

“Let me go, Rita!” he was shouting.

“We don’t mean him any harm! He was walking us out!” Armin declared.

“Step off and mind your own business!” She cut them both a razor of a glare, then switched her grip to shake Eren by the shoulder. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Walking them out!”

“After all the damn trouble I went through for you?”

“He’s a friend! Back off, Rita!”

“No, you listen to me, eh? Look at me.” She snapped her fingers in front of his nose and he pursed his lips. He looked more and more like the petulant child Armin remembered under her pin-sharp attentions. “You get back to the bar right now, and you better pray they haven’t noticed you missing. Because if they have, I’ll find you after, and you can bet that I’m going to hit you in all the same spots they did.”

Eren bared his teeth, but it failed to hold any more menace than a puppy’s first growl. “You’re not my mother!”

“Since when has that stopped me? Get going.” She snapped her fingers again and pointed to the black void she had just spilled out from. “Now.”

He made to argue, jaw dropping, but all she had to do was pop one brow and Eren packed his protests away. He moved sullenly, hands thrust into his pockets and shoulders hunched, and stopped to shoot one last look at Armin.

His heart skidded and sputtered under the weight of those eyes, sorry and beckoning. Armin wet his lips. Ought he say something? Would Rita ban him from meeting him tomorrow?

“I don’t hear any footsteps!” she threatened. Eren was seething but he obeyed at last, slinking down into shadows and out of sight. 

With Eren gone, she set her deadly sights on the two of them. Jean stood taller than her by a close shave, two centimeters at most, but that hardly mattered. Rita towered over them both with nothing more than a hand at her hip and a lamp in their faces, and neither one had the stones to lift their chin.

“Miss…” Armin started.

“What exactly are you looking to do here? Hmm?” 

“Talk,” Jean muttered. He flinched when her eyes met his. “We only meant to talk.”

“I knew him!” Armin interjected. His thoughts flashed and zipped. An alibi would be nice, but there was little he could do to justify singling out Eren for any reason other than sex or the truth. At least now he could count on Eren to vouch for his good intentions – and hopefully to keep Armin’s name out of the wrong man’s ear. “In Shingansina. Six years ago. We grew up together. Just ask him, he’ll tell you.”

She inhaled coldly through her nose, thin on patience and breath alike. “Shingansina…” she drawled. Her dark eyes bored into Armin’s like nails to wood. “That’s a long time ago. Long enough to be a dream.”

“It’s the truth!” Jean barked suddenly. “Quit messing around and treating us like some kind of criminals!”

“Give me a reason to and I will.” She brought the lamp closer to Armin’s face, studying the minutiae of his face with a grim curl to her lip. He couldn’t help but shiver. “So what do you want from him, Sweetie? Looking to cash in on a favor?”

“No! Just to talk, like we said.” Armin looked to Jean, who pressed his lips tight and widened his eyes. “Just to meet him again. I…it’s been so long, I wasn’t sure if I had the right person, but he is.”

She regarded him coolly. “No. He isn’t.” 

“But—“

“What were you planning on doing now? Popping over for tea and cakes? Sharing your old time gossip? The Eren you knew was a child. He hasn’t been the same for a long, long time. And neither have you.” She clucked her tongue and withdrew the lamp. “This isn’t a place you should get meddlesome with, darling.”

“I wasn’t going to meddle,” Armin said hotly.

“So you weren’t coming to _rescue_ him?” Both of them fell silent. Rita smiled. Her hand left her hip to dip into Jean’s palm, scooping out a handful of coins and rubbing them together, dropping them back into his clutch with tiny tings and clinks that seemed to shake the ground. One by one they fell, until all that was left was a single ungainly black button from Bertolt’s coat. She turned it in the air before them. “My my, what a lucky boy. Two handsome princes with a pocket of gold at the ready, coming to slay all the dragons.” 

Jean swallowed thickly. Armin found himself at a loss for words.

She flicked the button back into Jean’s hand as if it were a speck of dust. “You boys are with the police, right? You should know better. There’s more than one hook in all our skins. You could spend a lifetime trying to untangle them, and you’d still rip him apart.” That ringed hand curled over the back of Armin’s head, stroking his hair affectionately. Every muscle in his shoulders seized. She purred to him, “You might mean well, sweetie, but don’t you dare fill his head with cheap promises. They go for less than dirt around here.”

With a swish of her skirts and a wink to Jean, she left them alone, taking the light and all the thrill of the night with her. Jean shuffled his feet on the stone as he, presumably, tried to regain their bearings.

“Uh. It’s a straight path out? Right Armin?”

“Mostly,” he replied, blinking dimly in the dark. 

They did emerge unscathed, though progress had been rather slow with them clutching one another’s sleeves and patting their way around the walls. When the cellar doors were thrust open and they clambered into the open alley, Jean stretched in the moonlight with a grateful sigh and Armin shuffled with hunched shoulders, eyes to the ground. 

“What a night.” Jean hissed under his breath and then looked to Armin. He took a turn for the pensive, a grave frown turning on his lips. “Hey Armin. That girl he saved. It was Mikasa, wasn’t it?”

“Ah?” Armin cocked his head. Debated. She might be upset with him for telling. Mikasa was a very private person, and it was hardly a happy memory. But Eren had mentioned the scarf, and everyone knew that she and Armin had been living together for ages, virtually orphaned save for an invalid “Aunt”. Armin slowly nodded. “Yes. Yeah, actually. But don’t say anything to her, Jean. Please.”

Jean was quiet, but he did not remove his stare. At last he clucked his tongue. “Then I guess we owe that guy a lot. What a shitty…” He shook his head. Bumped his fist to his brow. “Damn. What shitty luck, ending up in a place like that.”

“Yeah.” Armin held his middle tight. Jean had long since replaced the money in his pocket, but it had yet to leave Armin’s mind. All he could see was the gold and the buttons trickling through Rita’s gaudily dressed fingers. It enveloped him with the coldest notions.

Empty promises indeed. 

“Hey.” Jean clapped his shoulder and gave him a shake. “Don’t listen to that old bitch. Noon tomorrow. He’ll be there.”

“Sure,” Armin agreed faintly.

“If he doesn’t come I’ll punch him out and carry him to you.”

That at least gave him a laugh. “Not if he punches you first, Jean.”

“He got the drop on me! That’s all there is to it!”

But Armin was snickering, and Jean had that sly smile back on, and the night was warm and kind to them on their trek back to the barracks.


End file.
